Mapping Class

Privilege and Terror in He Sleeps and Black Girl in Paris

He Sleeps and Black Girl in Paris share a number of structural features, despite also diverging, narratively, in several ways—a divergence that will become more important in the latter part of this chapter. Both texts are, as I have already noted, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century works published within one year of each other (Black Girl in Paris in 2000, He Sleeps in 2001). More curiously, both of these early twenty-first-century texts are set firmly in the twentieth century, specifically in the mid-1980s—and both deliberately absent their protagonists from the continental United States. The “black girl” of Youngblood’s title, twenty-six-year-old aspiring writer Eden, travels to Paris in September 1986, while McKnight’s thirty-four-year-old African American protagonist, Bertrand, a PhD student, travels to Dakar, Senegal, on a Fulbright fellowship to research urban legends in the spring of 1985.9

Thus both novels present black creative or intellectual figures who journey abroad during a politically complex period in recent history—the Reagan era, which, as I have already argued in chapter 1, was a moment of expansion for the U.S. black middle class even as it also constituted a moment of repression and restriction for the black poor and working class after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.10 This period in history, the early to mid-1980s, is also a moment during which, despite a Cold War–driven politics of isolation among Western world leaders including Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, black thinkers continued to advance a sense of the complex interconnectedness of African-descended peoples around the globe, even as they acknowledged that these diasporic connections contained “disunity, misrecognition, differences, and disjunctures.”11 The structural similarities between He Sleeps and Black Girl in Paris vis-à-vis the temporal position of their characters, as well as those characters’ geographic dislocation from the United States, thus point to the turn of the twenty-first century as a moment when older post-soul black artists are both beginning to look back—to the 1980s as a related but distinctly different period within the post–Civil Rights era—and turning outward, beyond the borders of the United States, to consider how post-soul blackness moves globally.

The black and bourgeois dilemma—a sense of racial vulnerability that persists despite the presumably covering protection of class privilege—influences both Bertrand’s and Eden’s journeys out of the United States, although these journeys subsequently take radically divergent paths. Nods to this classed and raced paradox are evident in both their protagonists’ class positioning and the signal role of racial terror in both narratives. He Sleeps follows Bertrand, an African American doctoral candidate in anthropology (158) who has traveled to Dakar to complete his thesis research. And while Bertrand’s immediate circumstances, as advanced graduate student and lecturer, preclude us from identifying him as particularly privileged economically, his chosen occupation—college professor and scholar—is certainly a middle-class one. Further, the text makes clear his middle-class origins. Bertrand is raised in suburban Colorado Springs, in “the white world” of “small Colorado towns . . . dry air, fir trees, Chinook winds that scale down the mountains” (178). He attends “parochial school” (89)—signaling parents with the financial means, and motivation, to pay for private education and the pedigree that is presumed to come with it.

By contrast, Eden’s class status in Black Girl in Paris is more ambiguous. Eden describes herself as a “girl born into a poor family” (28), the adopted orphan daughter of two older adults who were orphans themselves:

When I was four years old my parents told me that I was an orphan. My parents were orphans too. They found each other in church one Sunday. Hermine was a big-boned, sturdy, pecan-colored woman, with green eyes and gray hair she kept braided and wrapped around her head. She taught Prior Walker how to read the Bible, and in return he worshipped her. . . . She was a seamstress in a blue-jean factory, and he was the custodian at a bank. (15)

Eden’s mother and father are employed in blue-collar occupations involving low-status physical labor such as cleaning and factory work. Instead of bourgeois, then, on the basis of occupation and material resources alone, we might read Eden’s family of origin as working class or perhaps as part of the working poor. And describing both Eden and her parents as orphans also symbolically denies the family access to generational wealth—recalling the way that class status for black people is so often both aspirational and perpetually in progress. Yet it would be an error to misread an adult Eden as poor or even working class in status based on these circumstances.

As we learn, Eden has always aspired to a life of the mind, a goal that her parents did what they could to support: “When I was thirteen my parents gave me a typewriter, for which they had made many sacrifices” (20). She earns a college degree and, before scraping up the funds to move to Paris, makes her living as an archivist: “Before Paris, at university, I studied English literature, and all it was good for in the end was a job as a librarian” (21). The “library” in which she works, however, is “the basement of a dead man’s house” (28), specifically the Villa Louisa, “known locally as the Dimple Mansion, built by the richest black man born into slavery.” The house “had become a museum and a memorial to a family of successful African American entrepreneurs” (22). This description of the Dimple family operates as a reminder, in Youngblood’s narrative, of how mutable class has been, historically, for black people—one might be born a slave but end up a millionaire, just as one might be, like Eden, “born into a poor family” but become a middle-class college graduate. By situating Eden as an employee of—and placing her within—the Dimple Mansion, Youngblood both gestures toward this history of class mobility and aspiration and sets up a contrast between Eden as humble librarian and the outsized wealth of the Dimple family. This positioning is the first moment in the novel in which space and place somewhat obscure Eden’s middle-class status. Yet Eden’s modestly compensated but professional work, giving tours and working to catalog the vast collection of Dimple artwork, papers, and ephemera, clearly marks her as a skilled, middle-class worker despite her origins.

We might also consider how even the training Eden’s parents provide speaks to middle-class aspiration: they raise her to observe what we might now call “respectability politics,” which scholars have pointed out are frequently indicative of black American middle-class mores and strictures of decorum.12 Eden’s parents teach her to be respectable in a number of ways, both through direct disciplining of her sexuality and gender performance (“Don’t let boys touch you. . . . Be a sweet girl” [21]) and through a series of indirect messages about proper (and improper) comportment that she absorbs through differing versions of the black church—one that she encounters with her “holy” (20) and restrained parents, another with her mother’s exuberant best friend and adopted “aunt” to Eden, Aunt Victorine.

As Eden notes, at her parents’ church, First African Baptist Missionary Church, “the service was orderly, the hymns hushed, and . . . nobody cried too loud or shouted that the Holy Ghost had them by the collar” (17–18); at Aunt Vic’s church, by contrast, the Church of Modern Miracles, there was a “three-piece band—drums, electric organ, and electric guitar—and several ladies in the front row who shook tambourines and their ample hips and tremulous breasts all through the service” (18). Eden, whose strong voice leads her to be put in the young people’s choir at Aunt Vic’s church, is also brought by Aunt Vic to perform “at the age of six in juke joints on dirt roads for miles around almost every Saturday night” (18). Eden notes, “If Mama hadn’t found out when I was thirteen, I might’ve become a star on the dirt floor circuit” (18). In other words, Eden learns a particular kind of middle-class (or middle-class-aspiring) church-girl decorum from her parents’ congregation but observes an entirely different aesthetic and cultural approach to worship in Aunt Vic’s church, where “People shouted [and] . . . were possessed by the Holy Spirit, who took over their bodies, shaking them with emotion and filling their eyes with tears and their throats with hallelujahs” (18). This version of worship is a fleshly and passionate one, evincing an aesthetic that seemingly extends to (or draws from) the secular, blues-driven performances that Eden is coached into on Saturday nights.13

Yet once Eden’s mother becomes aware of Aunt Vic’s circulation of Eden as performer, instead of being punished for her years of youthful labor as a budding blues woman on the “dirt floor circuit,” Eden’s talents are contained and disciplined into a more class-appropriate outlet: “I started taking classical voice lessons from a mean old Creole woman who used to be an entertainer. Her long black curls left greasy spots on the collars of her old-fashioned quilted pastel dressing gowns” (18–19). Not only do the lessons themselves shift the genre of music from blues to classical, itself a class marker, but the teacher’s “Creole” identity and “long black curls” mark her as a higher-class carrier of culture and bearing. Eden’s mother prefers that a teenaged Eden study music in this way rather than through performances in low-class (“dirt floor”) outlets for money and attention. Of course, such performances also likely raised moral and practical concerns for Eden’s religious mother. Performing as a minor in front of adult crowds, particularly as “Aunt Vic taught [her] to lift the hem of [her] dress and dance at the end of the song like Josephine Baker” (18), Eden could well be risking not just her reputation but her safety. Yet it is difficult to tease such concerns completely apart from the apparent class breach effected by her performances, particularly given the classed nature of the remedy (e.g., formal voice lessons rather than additional time in church or prayer at home).

Considering Eden’s parental training in concert with her education, then, I argue that Eden—despite her parents’ working-class livelihoods—can and should be read as a black middle-class subject. Or perhaps it might be closer to describe Eden as a black middle-class subject in the making, the product of her parents’ aspiration and her own self-creation, from orphan to librarian to—she hopes—writer. This, despite the fact that her sojourn to Paris repeatedly emphasizes how little money she actually has. In fact, I want to suggest that Youngblood’s narrative situates Eden in Paris in order to strip her temporarily, via her spatial positioning, of any of her class protections. This has the effect not only of re-creating Eden’s character as an impoverished “starving artist” but also of granting her a critical vantage point from which to view both the geopolitical and economic circumstances within which creative and intellectual labor happens, particularly for black women. Unlike Bertrand, whose geospatial positioning in Dakar reinforces his own gendered privilege, Eden’s location in Paris—and the attendant destabilization of her class position—enables her to see both her blackness and her gender critically and through the eyes of an emerging artist. This geographic shift, and accompanying shift in Eden’s material circumstances, allows Black Girl in Paris to question the relationships between privilege, gender, labor, and creative voice.

Importantly, we can read not just class privilege but also a paradoxical sense of corporeal vulnerability as foundational to both Bertrand’s choice to travel to Dakar and Eden’s decision to travel to Paris. If we understand both characters as middle class, we must also take note of the ways that both characters, despite this positioning, perceive themselves as perpetually susceptible to racial terror. The persistence of this racialized sense of vulnerability for Bertrand and Eden runs counter, in many ways, to black expatriate narratives and mythology from earlier periods in American history, which have suggested that other parts of the world, and Europe in particular, might serve as a kind of safe haven for black American artists and writers fleeing U.S. racism.14 Thus we might understand He Sleeps and Black Girl in Paris to be speaking to a newer, post–Civil Rights or post-soul sensibility about place—one that refuses to understand any locale around the world as a space of safety from anti-blackness. While a figure like the eponymous (and perpetually coming or going) protagonist of Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips gestures in this direction, as when a racist insult from her French boyfriend makes clear that “the bright, frank, endlessly beckoning horizon of the runaway had been, at some point, transformed into a complicated return,” Youngblood’s and McKnight’s texts, both published some fifteen years after Lee’s, offer more explicit attention to black vulnerability’s global reach.15

In the case of Bertrand, his deep-seated fear of racialized violence is only revealed near the end of the novel, as he explains a long-standing mystery within the text, the mystery of why he had been so invested in “privacy” that he refused to cohabitate even with his own wife:

Private, private, I had to be private. . . . I let all these stories mess with my mind. I remember this young couple who were murdered out on Gold Camp Road, back when I was in high school. Black boy, white girl, both sixteen. They were out hitchhiking, not far from where the girl lived, near Cheyenne Mountain. Some guy picked them up, drove them down Gold Camp, shot them dead, and cut off their ears. . . . I was sixteen myself, when I read that story, and it made me feel that our homeland, our whole fucking country, is full of people like this. The whole goddamn planet. So I suppose I learned to believe that people like us need to be quiet and careful. (208–9)

What Bertrand here describes is a lingering trauma, persistent fear born of his sense of identification with another “black boy,” sixteen years old like himself, who is punished violently for his association with a white lover. The punishment involves not merely loss of the boy’s life but mutilation of his (and his girlfriend’s) body, with the violent removal of the couple’s ears signaling a strange kind of refusal of their engagement as human beings—after all, the killer does not cut out their eyes, tongues, or even genitals, but attacks an organ that represents the human ability to listen, to hear not only each other but the world that surrounds them.

The fact that Bertrand extrapolates from this story a sense that the United States is “full of people like this” is hardly surprising, given the history of racial terror in this country—particularly around the perceived sexual threat of black boys and young men toward white women, from Jesse Washington to Emmett Till and beyond. “All these stories” that “mess with” Bertrand’s mind are not, after all, apocryphal, but a horrifying fact of black life in America. Yet his addition of “the whole goddamn planet” signals his belief, or his fear, that this virulent hatred of blackness is not confined to the borders of the United States and instead lurks within whites everywhere in the world. This, then, speaks to Bertrand’s decision to travel to West Africa, which he sees as a place where he as a black man might find respite in anonymity.

Like Bertrand, Eden is traumatized by racist violence during childhood. Her first-person narration in Black Girl in Paris notes that “the spring before I arrived in Paris, the city was on alert” (4) due to a series of terrorist attacks in Europe, including a commercial airplane exploding over Athens. Yet Eden reacts to the potential danger of traveling into Europe with world-weary cynicism, as a black American whose childhood was framed by Civil Rights–era violence:

I was no stranger to terrorism . . .

I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, where my parents witnessed the terror of eighteen bombs in six years. During that time the city was nicknamed Bombingham. When the four little girls were killed by a segregationist’s bomb at church one Sunday morning in 1963, I had just started to write my name. I still remember writing theirs . . . Cynthia . . . Addie Mae . . . Carole . . . Denise . . . Our church sent letters of condolence to their families. We moved to Georgia, but I did not stop being afraid of being blown to pieces on an ordinary day if God wasn’t looking. (5)

Just as an adolescent Bertrand identifies with the sixteen-year-old “black boy” who is murdered, a three-year-old Eden identifies with the four young black girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In each case, learning of the death of another black child or children defines the character’s childhood in ways that continue to resonate in his or her adult life. As Bertrand goes on to note, for instance, “I didn’t live with you, Baby, because I thought they’d track us down, chuck rocks through our windows, burn crosses on our yards” (210). He refuses the marital intimacy that he craves (he “loves to hear the sounds of marital sleep” [85]) for fear of being systemically targeted by racists. By contrast, an adult Eden, survivor of years of post-traumatic stress over the racist terrorism of her childhood, seems to seek out the terrorism that France promises precisely because she has turned her fear inward, into depression and even suicidal ideation: “Bombs were exploding all over the city the fall I arrived, and that made tickets to Paris cheap and suicide unnecessary” (7). Unlike black artists and writers before her, Eden travels to Paris not—or not simply—for creative freedom, or freedom from American racism, but also because the terrorism happening in the “City of Light” feels depressingly familiar.

If both characters are shaped by their class positioning and their experience of racialized vulnerability, both also temporarily reposition themselves through travel. Yet this travel does not, ultimately, free or protect them from embodied precarity. By journeying to an impoverished, postcolonial West African geopolitical site, Bertrand inadvertently deemphasizes his racial hypervisibility as a black person among whites and emphasizes, instead, his spatial and material privilege as an (African) American among Africans. Eden, by traveling to a wealthy European city with little money and few of the institutional and structural connections that Bertrand has (i.e., his Fulbright fellowship), voluntarily abandons much of her own relative material privilege, in the process emphasizing her blackness and her womanhood—both of which operate in concert with her chosen poverty to compound her position of disadvantage. For both characters, this re-situation offers the possibility of new perspective on their racial and gendered identities, but each must first arrive at a kind of corporeal violation—for Eden, a desperate brush with prostitution and sex work under the influence of a lecherous, wealthy white man; for Bertrand, a “very crude, very sloppy circumcision” (207) at the hands of a group of Senegalese men—in order to precipitate their new sense of vision. In these two texts, the physical “territory” of the (sexualized) black body thus remains vulnerable to, even terrorized by, the geographical territories within which that body resides.

“Everybody Not Free”: Gender, Labor, and Privilege in Dakar and Paris

He Sleeps is told from Bertrand’s point of view and, in addition to conventional third-person-limited narration, includes a postmodern assemblage of texts that Bert ostensibly produces throughout his time in N’Gor Village, a small community just outside of Dakar: letters to his sister, best friend, and wife; transcripts of phone calls and imagined conversations; and most important, entries in his journal. As the novel opens, readers learn via one of his letters that a Senegalese family, the Kourmans, has unexpectedly begun living in the other two rooms of the large house he is renting. The drama of the novel takes place largely in Bertrand’s mind, as his life in Dakar—which begins as a series of gendered conflicts with Senegalese men over dominance—is increasingly taken over by both the Kourmans’s presence and the sudden onset, for Bertrand, of frequent, vivid, sometimes sexual dreams.

These dreams are all the more shocking for him given that, as he claims, “never in all my thirty-four years have I ever dreamed” (30). He has also never been sexually or romantically involved with a black woman, a peculiarity of his character that shapes his interactions with women throughout the text. His wife finds condoms in his suitcase before he leaves for Dakar and believes he intends to end his lifelong flight from black women while on the continent; his deep but unacknowledged attraction to Kene Kourman is made all the more fraught by Bertrand’s confused desire to imagine her as “his first, his only, the corporeity of his dreams” (77). By the novel’s conclusion, Bertrand’s life is utterly upended; Kene’s husband, Alaine, accuses Bertrand of sleeping with Kene, something Bertrand cannot remember doing but cannot quite deny. The novel reveals that Kene “gave” Bertrand the dreams by talking to and touching him as he slept (170). At the novel’s climax, Bertrand, who is almost constantly asleep—a situation that the novel emphasizes for both its figurative meaning in and literal complications for Bertrand’s life—is put on trial for the crime of his alleged dalliance with Kene, found guilty, and punished by Alaine with a forcible circumcision.

This brief synopsis captures only some of this novel’s complexity. Only at its conclusion does He Sleeps make clear that Bertrand’s motivation for traveling to Dakar has a great deal to do with his desire to escape the sense of racialized, bodily vulnerability that accompanies black subjectivity in the United States. The notion that journeying to Africa, in particular, would alleviate the fear of racist violence that plagues Bertrand, however, comes up a bit earlier in the text—but as the novel continually makes clear, Bertrand’s fantasy of “Africa” has little to do with the reality of the continent, and especially the specific geopolitical location, Senegal, where he ends up:

There is something about this path leading to the summer home [the location of the tribunal] that reminds him of the way he used to imagine Africa before he actually came here. . . . The path is resplendently green and wild, flitting with birds by day, rustling with bats at night. In short, it is the African jungle he’d carried in his mind’s eye since childhood, not so much a place of mystery but of vanishing. But it is the only such strip of land he has seen in his short time here. The Senegal he’s come to know in these five months is semiarid, mostly rolling grassland, interrupted now and then with naked baobab trees and patches of red earth that reminds him of his stepfather’s native home of Harlem, Georgia. (180, emphasis added)

For Bertrand, the imagined Africa of his childhood—a stereotypically verdant and “wild” tangle of natural splendor and animal life—is a place not of mystery, as indicated by white fantasies of Africa such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but rather of “vanishing,” suggesting that what appeals to Bertrand about Africa as a location is the possibility that he might lose himself there, his blackness no longer a highly visible exception in a “white world” (178). Yet the next lines of the passage undercut Bertrand’s vague and exoticizing fantasy with specificity, a highly particular description of the wide-open Senegalese landscape as “semiarid . . . rolling grassland”—hardly the fertile hiding place that Bertrand has dreamed of—and a reference to “red earth” that serves as a reminder of, rather than an escape from, the black American experience as one grounded in both southern landscapes and urban carcerality (Harlem, Georgia).16

We might, in fact, consider Bertrand’s dreams themselves as offering a kind of alternate geography in He Sleeps, mapping Bertrand’s unexamined inner reality, and his unconscious or unacknowledged desires, especially as these diverge from the actual landscapes he traverses in Senegal. I emphasize unexamined because Bertrand makes clear that he does not experience his dreams as a product of his own consciousness or as something he has deliberately crafted. He understands himself, rather, as a passive victim of the dreams’ content, signaling both Kene’s role in triggering his dreams and also his lack of self-awareness: “‘I had always suspected that people were talking about something they’d invented, imagined. I always believed dreams took one’s will. But this thing happened to me” (22). Not surprisingly, when Bertrand seeks advice from his research assistant, Idrissa, as to the meaning of one of his dreams, Idrissa’s response is to point out Bertrand’s own lack of conscious awareness: “‘Dreams always mean the same thing,’ he said. ‘Means you’re asleep’” (33).

The dream at the center of Bertrand and Idrissa’s exchange is the very first dream that Bertrand has in the novel. In the dream, he travels up a mountain and through a decay-filled swamp with his two brothers-in-law (his lesbian sister’s two ex-husbands) in the direction of his parents’ house, ending up in his “father’s garden,” a garden that grows fruits in “shapes like breasts and penises, elbows, brains, faces” (29). This points to his unconscious fantasies about Africa as a literal Eden and to his journey there as one that would cement bonds of brotherhood and provide for him “solid ground” where he might “plant” his “bare feet in the soil” (29) and cleanse himself of the “swill” and “muck” (28) of American racism. This may be Bertrand’s unspoken dream of Africa, but the novel repeatedly exposes how what Bertrand seeks, in his mind’s eye, from his new location in Senegal, is very different from the spaces and places he actually finds there. Indeed, the contrast between Bertrand’s expectations of Senegal as an African American and the reality of his experiences reveals how, as Michelle Ann Stephens has argued, “empire . . . is the context shaping all black travels, displacements, and even engagements with various forms of internationalist discourse throughout the twentieth century.”17 The diasporic brotherhood Bertrand seeks contains within it a colonizing impulse that turns on not only his geographic and material privileges but also on his problematic understandings of black American, and African, masculinity.

Not surprisingly, class privilege is one way that Bertrand is immediately marked as an American, and an outsider, in Senegal. Even without knowing his circumstances, strangers in Dakar make assumptions about his financial status; shortly after he arrives he is surrounded by a group of teenage boys who demand, “’Merican bruddah, you godt money?” (34). Bertrand recalls, “they weren’t poor, even I could see that. Western clothed, . . . they dripped oil milk fat honey” (34). The fact that these boys demand money from Bertrand although they “weren’t poor” implies a global power differential in which Bertrand’s status as (African) American traveler is automatically equated with economic excess—an excess so great that he is expected not to notice, or to acknowledge, the relative privilege of his Senegalese interlocutors. Bertrand is asked to play the role of “wealthy American” to the boys’ (literally) assumed poverty, in the process participating in a monetary exchange that plays on the supposed kin relationship—“’Merican bruddah”—between himself and his Senegalese hosts. As Bianca Williams notes, “the classed differences associated with the ‘American’ in ‘African American,’ and the subsequent access to class and geographic mobility,” trouble the presumed “unity or . . . sameness of diaspora.”18

There is resonant overlap here between McKnight’s fictional narrative of one black American’s experience in Senegal and the later, nonfiction account of another black American’s experience in Ghana. Saidiya Hartman’s 2007 Lose Your Mother, a text that weaves memoir, travelogue, and history into critical analysis, tells a similar story of solicitation, also couched in the slippery language of kinship: “As I climbed the muddy incline leading to the entrance of Elmina Castle, a group of adolescent boys approached me yelling, ‘Sister!’ ‘One Africa!’ ‘Slavery separated us.’” These boys hand Hartman well-worn letters proclaiming their brotherly feelings for her and asking her to help, presumably financially, with their “need of pencils and paper.” Hartman goes on to note: “It was a hustle, and we were all aware of this; nonetheless, we assumed our respective roles.” These roles of patron and supplicant, beggar and benefactor, imply a pecuniary relationship that Hartman recognizes as inimical to the family affinity that the boys affect: “But how could these scruffy adolescents love me or anyone else like me? You could never love the foreigner whose wealth required you to inveigle a handful of coins.”19 For Hartman, as for Bertrand, lip service to diasporic “brotherhood” cannot adequately conceal the structures of economic exchange and uneven access that shape this interaction.

This incongruity perhaps explains why, in He Sleeps, Bertrand has similar problems even from those with whom he is more intimately involved. The fellowship money that he uses for his living expenses is considered a small fortune by many in Dakar, and as a result the Senegalese people Bertrand becomes close to also read him as affluent—a perception that both corresponds to and exceeds his actual material resources in the United States. After all, in many ways he is “rich” by Senegalese standards, as are most Americans, even if by U.S. measures his lifestyle as a graduate student is more than modest. As Hartman is chastised by a fellow black American, a permanent expatriate living in Accra, “You’re still sitting pretty compared to most. Do you know how many families could live on your Fulbright fellowship?” (28). Because he is unable to reconcile or even acknowledge this contradiction, Bertrand is unable to connect fully with any of the Senegalese men close to him, as money and status always create a barrier between them.

For instance, even though the man who will become Bertrand’s assistant and confidant, Idrissa, refuses a tip from him when they first meet, because he recognizes Bertrand as a scholar, not a tourist, their subsequent relationship is complicated by the fact that Idrissa is both Bertrand’s employee and his guide to the Senegalese cultural marketplace. In one crucial exchange, Bertrand believes that Idrissa has gotten him a good price on his rented room, but when Alaine Kourman discovers how much Bertrand is paying, he accuses Idrissa of cheating his American employer: “He’s take advantage of you” (69). Confronted by Bertrand, Idrissa is unrepentant and resentful of Bertrand’s dependence on him: “You told me that . . . the university was paying you, and this other foundation, too, who pay you. I didn’t think it was your own money” (80). Idrissa’s comment highlights the way Bertrand’s money is viewed by his Senegalese acquaintances as a kind of windfall rather than “[his] own,” earned, money. Indeed, in many ways Bertrand’s intellectual work—not perceived as labor in the conventional sense—situates him outside of the economic system in which many of the Senegalese men who surround him operate, creating further distance between them.

Ironically, however, given his anger on Bertrand’s behalf, Alaine himself also “take[s] advantage” of Bertrand financially. Alaine, who appears solidly middle class by Senegalese standards—he was educated in France and now has a civil service job—manipulates Bertrand into buying a new refrigerator for the house and into paying Kene extra money for weekly supplies. Bertrand deeply resents these efforts but is paradoxically unable to refuse Alaine’s requests. As Bertrand writes in his journal, “I remember every franc he’s robbed me of, how frequently he’s lied to me: There was coffee in the house last Monday. He did have the money for the water bill. He did forget my quinine tabs, and he does owe me the eleven thousand CFA. But do I stand up to him? I do not” (31). Bertrand sees his own behavior as weak, even imagines himself as “the new Mrs. Kourman” (68) because he is unable to stand up to his housemate.

Differing conceptions of masculinity are at the center of this conflict. Bertrand follows a Western model predicated upon “rugged individualism” and defensive displays of bravado, imagining himself as what Paul Smith, referencing film icon Clint Eastwood, has called the “rebellious, maverick, sometimes Promethean hero,” or what post-soul critic Mark Anthony Neal defines as the “Strong Black Man,” while the Senegalese men that Bertrand encounters privilege interdependence and mutual respect—hence Alaine’s seemingly emasculating treatment of Bertrand as a younger brother, a member of his family (68).20 Despite his dream of finding brotherhood in an African Eden, when Bertrand is actually treated as a brother, with accompanying real-life demands and responsibilities, he is taken aback, suggesting his American inability—or refusal—to adapt to the cultural norms of his actual environment in Senegal.

In addition to his conflict with Alaine, Bertrand’s Westernized approach leads to numerous other misunderstandings in his interactions with Senegalese men. One central example is his encounter with a local man named Doudou, whose home Bertrand visits during an ultimately disappointing search for Senegalese palm wine. Indeed, Bertrand’s expectations of this native African wine, which he had “craved . . . ever since [he] read Amos Tutuola’s novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard in college” (97), again reveal the extent to which his perceptions of “Africa” are informed by fantasy and even misinformation and foreshadow the subsequent interpersonal conflict. The very fact that Bertrand’s interest in palm wine is piqued by a work of fiction indicates the manner in which his expectations of West African culture are grounded in invention, in what E. Frances White calls the “collective political memories of African culture” that African Americans “construct and reconstruct” for our own purposes.21 That Bertrand is in Senegal seeking a beverage more common to Nigeria (where Tutuola’s novel is set) is also significant, here—to Bertrand as an (African) American, perhaps these two countries appear interchangeable in spite of their divergent cultures and histories.

Although he describes Tutuola’s fantastical novel as “so strange, like a dream”—again suggesting that the dreamscape of Africa is more real to Bertrand than its actual geography—and although Tutuola “never attempts to describe the taste, color, or smell of palm wine” (97), Bertrand nonetheless bases his beliefs about the wine’s magical properties on the improbable adventures of the novel’s central character. Bertrand muses to himself, “It would be cold as winter rain. It would be sweet like berries, and I would drink till my mind went swimming in deep waters” (99). Not only does Bertrand expect to encounter a sort of delicious and heavenly nectar, but he expects that drinking it will lead him to new levels of mental profundity. These expectations parallel his expectations for West African culture more broadly—as he imagines that his first “taste” of that culture will confer a physical or emotional “sweetness,” and an intellectual depth, to him as middle-class (African) American consumer.

Indeed, this connection is made explicitly earlier in the narrative when, during another of his particularly vivid dreams, Bertrand converses with a journalist whose racially ambiguous features “never fall together” (64); his “wide nose festooned with freckles, tired cat-green eyes, rust beard, small ears, short ’fro” (64) signal black American hybridity, but a hybridity that to Bertrand’s mind reads as “disjointed flashes” (64), not the presumably pure African coherence he craves. The journalist discusses Senegal with Bertrand in the language of both American cultural consumption and geographic occupation: “Strike out on your own. Take it in; drink it up. You’ll like it. Can’t help but. It’s home, homey. Drink deep, young man” (64). The linguistic parallel between “drink deep, young man” and the old American saw “go West, young man” invokes a spirit of exploration and the colonizing sense of West Africa as uncharted geographical territory, while the man’s insistence that “it’s home, homey” (use of the slang term “homey” here calling attention to Bertrand’s black Americanness) suggests that Bertrand will automatically feel comfortable and at ease within the culture of his presumed ancestors—entitled, as an American, and empowered, as a black man, to consume that culture with confidence. This cultural assumption extends to palm wine, which Bertrand believes will taste delicious to him.

Yet the reality of palm wine not only falls short of Bertrand’s sweet fantasies, but it also turns out to be “awful,” even “impossible to drink” (107). Notes Bertrand after his first taste, “If you could make wine from egg salad and vinegar, this palm wine is pretty much what you’d get” (107). Instead of an initiation into the “deep waters” of Senegalese or broader West African culture and experience, Bertrand is confronted with his own difference from them. He is shocked by the wine’s sour, “sulfuric” bouquet (107), quite literally its foreignness. Of course, Bertrand’s negative perception of the palm wine has been colored by what he as cultural outsider imagines it should be. The implicit imperialism of this standpoint is what puts Bertrand at odds with many of his Senegalese acquaintances, including Doudou.

Throughout the following scene, which spans several pages in the middle of the novel, Bertrand seems unable to understand this Senegalese man’s hostility toward him, although it is directly related to Bertrand’s status as outsider to and scholar (but not student) of Senegalese culture. Almost immediately after meeting him, Doudou challenges Bertrand’s academic work, highlighting the political meanings that historically have been embedded in the anthropological study of culture: “Omar tells me you’re an anthropologist. . . . The study of primitive cultures” (110). Doudou goes on to comment, with some sarcasm, “I knew an anthropologist once . . . who told me I should be proud to be part of such a noble, ancient, and primitive people” (111). Here Doudou critiques the exploitative and racist notion that black Africa is savage or “primitive.” He also, however, criticizes the paternalistic attitudes of figures like the unnamed anthropologist, who condescends to instruct the Senegalese on the relative value of their culture, even as he sets up a hierarchical relationship between “noble” savage and Western modernity, intellect, and technological advancement.22

Bertrand’s response, however, in broken French, reveals his inability or refusal to grasp the meanings behind Doudou’s statement, and particularly ignores the condescension of teaching “primitive” peoples that their culture has value: “Maybe . . . he trying to tell you that primitive . . . I mean, that in this case primitive mean the same thing as ‘pure’” (111). Here Bertrand takes the same paternalistic position vis-à-vis his African acquaintances, implicitly defending his fellow anthropologist’s use of the loaded term “primitive” by euphemistically associating it with purity. “Who studies your people?” Doudou responds. “Do you have anthropologists milling about your neighborhood? Do they write down everything you say?” (112). Doudou here points out the essential power imbalance that exists between (black) American academic and African “native.” His question might bring to mind, for us as readers, the ways that African Americans have, indeed, been the objects of anthropological inquiry. Yet in another ironic reminder of Bertrand’s class privilege, his inability to respond substantively—instead of answering Doudou’s question, Bertrand begins with a patronizing “Look, I know how you must [feel]” (112) before again being interrupted—suggests his estrangement from the impoverished black communities that have most often been similarly investigated. In this instance, class and region supersede the shared racial affinity that Bertrand assumed would exist with his Senegalese host. Instead, in Bertrand’s role as black American scholar of Africa he stands in for an entire history of Western exploitation of the global South, for the sake of knowledge.

Reiterating this point of view, another Senegalese man present during the exchange states hotly, “I get offended. I get very offended. You write us down. You don’t respect us. You come here and steal from us” (112). In response, Bertrand claims that he is “trying to help all black people by recovering our [lost] things” (112). Bertrand’s “trying to help” argument here, and his use of the first-person-plural possessive, “our,” suggest that he sees himself as a “native” anthropologist, that is, an anthropologist who studies his own cultural group, often “for the explicit political benefit of those co-natives under study.”23 Yet Bertrand, as a black American, is not truly a “native” to West African culture. Worse, he cannot seem to recognize his outsider status or the multiple arenas (geographical, national, ethnic, and material) in which his identity is not only marked differently from the Senegalese men’s but also monetarily privileged over theirs in historically informed ways. In Hartman’s words, “Who else but a rich American could afford to travel so far to cry about her past?”24 Indeed, Bertrand seems unaware that his very investment in staking a claim upon a mythicized, lost African inheritance marks him with the “sense of not belonging and of being an extraneous element [that] is at the heart of slavery”—in West Africa, a signal of his status as outsider.25

Thus even when Bertrand tries to rearticulate his black identity in the face of the men’s hostility, his efforts only highlight what the Senegalese men see as a fundamental difference between them. This is clear in Doudou’s reply: “Things lost? . . . That must mean you’re not pure. . . . [Y]ou think you can come here and bathe in our primitive dye, legitimize your blackness to the folks back home” (113). Given Bertrand’s fantasies of palm wine, the way that he imagines a taste of the liquid will send him to “deep waters,” we might well take Doudou’s words as an accurate description of Bertrand’s motives. But rather than expressing contrition after being thus called out for his misstep, Bertrand attempts to turn his own status as privileged American “Other” against his adversary. In response to Doudou’s hostile reference to his cultural impurity, Bertrand himself highlights the narrative analogy between palm wine and African culture, this time via a rejection of that culture, in his attempt to insult Doudou: “‘Want some palm wine?’ I said to Doudou. ‘It really tastes like crap’” (113).

The exchange culminates with Doudou asking Bertrand: “How does it feel . . . to be a black toubob?” (113). Toubob, a Wolof word that can mean both “stranger” and “white,” is here rightly taken by Bertrand as a counterinsult, especially after he tries to clarify in which sense Doudou is using the word, and Doudou replies aggressively, “In Wolof, ‘toubob’ is ‘toubob’ is ‘toubob’” (113). In other words, Bertrand’s status as Western “stranger” here reduces him to whiteness; such an accusation is particularly painful for a middle-class African American man whose connection to black identity is already tenuous at home. These interethnic and international clashes foreground global narratives of racial identity and their relationship to material privilege, as well as Bertrand’s simultaneous discomfort with his position as a “rich” American and related lack of consciousness about the political ramifications of his anthropological work in Senegal. In this black—African but not American—context, the black and bourgeois dilemma fractures, not into safety but into a parallel alienation. Just as it might in a working-class black American context, Bertrand’s black flesh accompanied by privilege fails to signify clearly to his Senegalese hosts, and the racialized belonging that he had imagined Africa would offer eludes him. In Senegal, his bourgeois status is only emphasized by the geographic privilege that accrues to his Americanness; both lead to his dismissal as a toubob, or stranger, and suggest, ultimately, that Bertrand’s idyllic dreamscape can never become his reality.

Youngblood’s Black Girl in Paris is a Künstlerroman, an artist’s coming-to-voice novel, about a young black woman, Eden Walker, who leaves everything she knows behind in order to travel to Paris and become a writer. Throughout the text, Eden is seeking to come into herself, creatively, and to follow in the footsteps of her idol, James Baldwin, in some way; she hopes even to meet and perhaps learn from him, and to find her writerly voice. As she notes on the first page of the novel:

James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera all had lived in Paris as if it had been part of their training for greatness. When artists and writers spoke of Paris in their memoirs and letters home it was with reverence. Those who have been and those who still dream mention the quality of the light, the taste of the wine, the joie de vivre, the pleasures of the senses, a kind of freedom to be anonymous and also new. I wanted that kind of life even though I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. (1–2)

While for Eden Paris’s significance rests in the site as the home of her artistic development, the reverence with which she speaks of and imagines the city is akin to Bertrand’s imagined sense of Africa in He Sleeps; in both cases, a real geopolitical location takes on a far more potent symbolic meaning in the fantasy world of the protagonist. Eden and Bertrand imagine Paris and Dakar, respectively, as places to be free, “anonymous and also new,” yet both characters find that the real places they encounter are far different from their fantasies.

After her father’s sudden death of a heart attack (30), Eden, inspired by the freedom fantasies of her Aunt Vic (“she talked about [Paris] as if it were a made-up place” [17]) and driven by her own dreams of “a kind of life different from the one [she] was living” (19), scrapes up money for a plane ticket to Paris and arrives there with a few hundred dollars and plans of working to keep herself afloat. These plans grow increasingly complex and desperate as Eden discovers how difficult it is to live outside of the modest class privileges she possessed in the United States. At the novel’s end, after becoming so strapped for money that she flirts with both prostitution and performing in an “erotic art film” (228), Eden finally finds her voice as a writer—coincidentally, before she actually encounters James Baldwin, on the penultimate page of the novel and during her “last day in Paris” (235)—and spends weeks holed up in a tiny room triumphantly writing down her story.

The title of the opening section of Youngblood’s text, “museum guide,” begins a pattern that continues throughout Black Girl in Paris of naming each section of the novel for the job or role that Eden holds during the period that section details; in this way, Black Girl in Paris is structured by Eden’s labor. Notably, this extends to emotional labor, as three of the nine sections of the text—“traveling companion,” “lover,” and “thief”—detail Eden’s various romantic entanglements in ways that highlight how much effort each relationship demands of her. Yet whether affective or physical, paid or unpaid, this story of Eden’s labor is far more compelling, and risky, for her character in Paris than it is in the United States precisely because of the way she is stripped of class protections in her new environment. Eden cannot work in middle-class, salaried employment while in Paris, because “stricter immigration rules” in the mid-1980s made it nearly impossible to get a “carte de séjour, an official work permit issued by the French government” (60).26 While she enacts a plan to find work anyway, her French friend Delphine warns her, “If you are caught working without a permit you could be deported” (61). Thus, unlike Bertrand’s experience in Dakar, Eden’s experience in Paris is one of sharply increased material precarity, as she must seek work that is off the books, paid in cash, and offered by individuals rather than institutions, in some cases individuals who themselves have limited funds to pay her—highlighting what LaShawn Harris calls “the complexities, danger, and unsteadiness of underground work.”27

Eden’s first paid work in Paris, for instance, is as a model for an impoverished painter and Holocaust survivor, Monsieur Deschamps. This is the first of several jobs Eden takes that reduce her to her body; as she says of the experience of working as an artist’s model generally, something she did once while in college: “I took off my robe and became a body, an art exercise, a statue” (68). It is worth noting that when Eden does such labor in the United States, it is not because she needs the work to survive but as a last-minute favor to her professor:

When I was in college I was asked by my art history professor if I wanted to make extra money modeling for an evening art class. One of the regular models had not shown up and they were desperate (67).

By contrast, both of the times Eden works as an artist’s model in France, her own financial need guides her choices. She seeks out and answers Monsieur Deschamps’s ad for a model because “I had only two days to find a job or I would soon be sleeping on a park bench or trying to sell my clothes from a blanket in the métro” (57). The imagined, even romantic quality of Eden’s hypothetical destitution here marks this as an early moment in her journey in Paris; by the time she again works as an artist’s model near the end of the text, after stints as an au pair, poet’s helper (in-home nurse, assistant, and “maid” [129] for a physically incapacitated writer), English tutor, and even (inadvertent) thief, Eden is the one who is nearly “desperate” for money: “I would not have been lying naked on a sofa in an almost empty apartment in the chemin du Casse Pieds if I had not been hungry and the artist were not paying me so well” (225–26).

Like early post-soul character Sarah Phillips’s game of Galatea with her French boyfriend Henri and his friends, in which Sarah “stood naked on a wooden box and turned slowly to have [her] body appraised and criticized,” this positioning of Eden as nude model—embodied object—in Paris has a particular, fetishized history.28 It recalls Khoisan woman Sarah Baartman, “Born in South Africa in 1789 [and] . . . exhibited on stage and in a cage in London and Paris” from 1810 until her death five years later, under the name “Hottentot Venus.”29 She was dissected by Georges Cuvier after her death, and her brain, skeleton, and genitalia remained on display at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until the mid-1970s. Her tragic story remains that of an “icon of the black female sexualized savage.”30 This history haunts Eden’s turn as a nude black woman on display in France; indeed, Baartman might be understood as more of—or at least just as much of—an artistic forebear for Eden than Baldwin is, despite Eden’s desire to trace her creative lineage through only her “literary godfathers” (4).

The freedoms those figures (specifically James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes) find in France are much more difficult for Eden to access as a black woman. As Jennifer D. Williams has noted, “The ease with which . . . a black woman’s performance of Galatea conjures the Venus Hottentot casts doubt on travel-as-freedom, by exposing racism’s inescapable boundaries.”31 In fact, these boundaries are not only those of race and racism. As with Bertrand’s tense conflicts with Senegalese men in He Sleeps, often over money—conflicts shaped by differing conceptions of masculinity—Eden’s encounters in Black Girl in Paris, particularly those related to her labor, are explicitly gendered. And despite her expectation that relocating to Paris will free her from systemic racial and gendered oppression, these gendered encounters almost always evoke a long and familiar history of whites devaluing and exploiting black women’s bodies and labor. After her short-lived stint as a model for Monsieur Deschamps, who lets her go because he cannot afford to pay her, Eden places ads around town, at “the American Church, the British Council, and the American Embassy”:

American Girl Seeks Employment as Au Pair, Typist, Private Secretary, House Painter, Companion. Experienced. Reasonable rates. (87)

With the possible exception of house painter, the positions that Eden lists in the ad are all low-paying, low-status, gendered work, and this gendering is reinforced by the word “girl,” which Eden uses “because all the other ads said it, and ‘woman’ in that context seemed too, well, womanly” (88). This is no coincidence; the nature of the work Eden seeks depends both upon the notion of this low-paid work as temporary and contingent, the sort of work that an inexperienced “girl” might do without opening her employer to charges of exploitation, and upon a history of infantilizing and disrespecting such workers, especially men and women of color.32

Indeed, given the racist history of the word “girl” (and “boy”) in the U.S. South, in which black adults in service roles were infantilized by whites, it is no surprise that Eden recoils when the infirm English poet who hires her as a caretaker says casually, “my girl will let you in” (124). Notes Eden, “I hope that the girl she is referring to is her daughter”—though, of course, she is not the poet’s daughter but a maid, a “French girl wearing a uniform of a simple gray dress with a plain white collar” (125). Eden is well aware of the history that attaches to the notion of being a laboring “girl,” described and used as a kind of possession. In speaking of the aged poet, Elizabeth, Eden acknowledges not only that “my people have a history of service to her people” (122) but also that “her skin is pale and privileged, mine is brown and sweaty from labor in her house” (122–23). The poet herself projects upon Eden’s body a history of black enslavement and possession, imagining herself into a fantasy of absolute power over Eden, a perversion of the power that an able-bodied Eden holds over Elizabeth given the latter’s illness and infirmity: “She said to me once that in glory days I would have been presented to her as a gift, like a toy at Christmas . . . and she wouldn’t have had to pay so dear a price” (123).

Eden wants to refuse this positioning of her black body as laboring object, but she cannot do so completely; instead, she allows her long-desired situation in the city of Paris, and her need for rent money and food, to compromise her presumed principles:

I don’t want to be anybody’s girl. My mother worked for white people all her life so I wouldn’t have to, she constantly reminds me. I don’t want to disappoint her, but I have not met James Baldwin, written a novel, or fallen in love. I want to stay a little longer in this place, and for that I am willing to do many things. (124)

Notably, place here provides the justification for Eden’s embodied compromises, her willingness to labor in ways that her parents’ hard work and class aspiration—and her own college education—would otherwise make unnecessary for her. Eden chooses to participate, via her continued labor, in the poet’s fantasy of her as her “girl” because of the pull of her own fantasies and desires—to meet James Baldwin, to write a novel, to fall in love—dreams that she believes can only come true for her in Paris. Eden ultimately continues to work for the poet until Elizabeth shares what has drawn Eden in all along, James Baldwin’s location in the south of France.

At other points in the text it is only the threat that her labor—already profoundly physical and embodied—will turn specifically sexual that motivates Eden to set strict boundaries on what she will do for money. Throughout the novel, even as she is willing to engage in many different kinds of informal labor to survive, she is unable to set aside “childhood lessons of religiosity, chastity, . . . and other tenets of respectable politics” to accept “extralegal employment [sex work, in particular] that was incongruent with learned and expected family and community values.”33 For instance, when Eden hears from a Swedish au pair of a nanny position with a French family that pays 8,000 francs (110), she inquires, only to realize that in addition to childcare and cleaning responsibilities that amount to those of a “full-time slave” (116), the position involves sexual exploitation by Monsieur Fabre, who is “usually very fond of the au pair” (118). Upon Eden’s arrival at the Fabre home, the door is answered by a “very pretty, petite dark-skinned woman” (113) in an ill-fitting maid’s uniform who speaks only “rapid Spanish” (113) in response to Eden’s queries. Eden later observes her “holding on her lap a baby that looks like her own” (117). As Madame Fabre mentions in passing that “there are some aspects of the job that may strike you as unconventional” (117), Eden begins to understand the sexualized pressures of the position: “I thought of the pretty young woman in the kitchen and wondered about the baby on her lap. I was sad to have found that I wasn’t so far from home after all. No thank you, Madame Fabre, I’d rather eat mud” (118). Eden’s refusal of this offer paradoxically speaks both to her privilege as a middle-class black American, still invested in respectability politics—since Eden’s ability to decline the job, and with considerable disdain, positions her above the less fortunate “dark-skinned” woman in the kitchen—and to the racism and sexual exploitation built into domestic labor both in the United States and globally, to which Eden’s presence in France makes her, ironically, more vulnerable. As Eden observes, the specifics of the job and the lingering presence of a previous victim in the person of the current maid, remind her that in Paris she is not “so far from home” as she might have hoped.34

Ironically, the position Eden here refuses turns out not even to offer the generous pay that she had imagined; during the interview, Madame Fabre tells Eden that the pay is only 5,000 francs per month, and responds to Eden’s gentle inquiry about the rumored 8,000-franc salary, “You misunderstood” (117). Clearly, a position that would merit 8,000 francs per month when performed by a white, Swedish woman is not so lucrative when Eden is the potential hire. Recalls Eden, “I remember my mother’s stories of being turned down for jobs or being refused housing or being offered lower wages because she was black” (117). Once again, Eden’s potential labor reveals that her positioning, even in France, is not “so far from home”—just as happened to her mother in the U.S. South, Eden finds that her blackness leads to an immediate devaluing of her laboring body.

This devaluing has everything to do with the way her racial origins are marked on her flesh; Eden’s narration includes the line “I was born in America, but you could look at me and see a map of Africa” (88). Because “Africa” is mapped onto Eden’s black body, any privilege that would normally accrue to her as an American abroad—the sort of geopolitical privilege that Bertrand unwittingly relies upon and is ultimately punished for in Senegal—does not operate in the same way, or at all, for Eden in Paris. The Welsh au pair who was employed by the American family immediately before Eden tells a story of following “American tour groups” on her days off and managing to “blend in”: “she would often be asked to join them for meals and invited onto their large buses for tours of the countryside” (151). These experiences are unavailable to Eden: “I could not blend in so well. My skin marked me, set me apart even though I was the American” (151). Just as the black and bourgeois dilemma fractures for Bertrand in the black-but-not-American context of Dakar, it fractures, and is refracted, differently for Eden in the white-but-not-American context of Paris. Her black skin obviates any privilege that might accrue to her as an American abroad, compounding the disadvantage of her temporarily diminished material circumstances, in her Paris life as a (laboring but) starving artist.

In addition, the “map of Africa” that marks Eden’s body precludes her ability to find refuge in Paris from American-style racial terror. Instead, the vulnerability of her black flesh travels with her to her new environment. Eden becomes involved with Ving, a white American jazz musician raised in New Orleans, with whom she falls in love in defiance of her upbringing and her sense that such a pairing constitutes “disloyalty to the race” and a reenactment of the “master-slave relationship” (150). Unlike Bertrand, who has never been with a black woman, Eden’s foray into interraciality is a first for her, something she believes is possible precisely because she is in Paris and there is “no one to judge [her] actions”—she is “a free woman and could choose whom and what [she] wanted” (150). On a date, however, walking home from a jazz club late at night, Eden and Ving are accosted by four young Frenchmen who call out insults (“T’as vu, le pédé qui promène son chien noir. Look at the queer walking his black dog” [164]) and throw empty beer bottles at them. Eden is violently reminded of the anti-black environment—notably bolstered, here, through a concomitant homophobia—she thought she had left behind in the United States: “Not far enough away to escape a familiar kind of humiliation. No translation was necessary” (164).

The text frames Eden’s reaction to this incident as precisely a question of class standing and privilege, erased or made irrelevant in the face of racist violence—the black and bourgeois dilemma made manifest in the streets of Paris. Eden remarks:

“Everybody not free, somebody somewhere is a nigger tonight.” My father’s words blazed in my memory. Those men hadn’t cared that I was American, college-educated, and Christian; all they saw was the color of my skin. Back home, I still wouldn’t be able to hold Ving’s hand without inviting comment or threat. What made me think I could be free? (164)

Eden is “American, college-educated, and Christian”—middle-class, and ostensibly privileged both geopolitically and in terms of her religious beliefs—and yet she is reduced to the derogatory terms “Salope. Putain. Chien Noir (Bitch. Whore. Black dog)” in these men’s eyes. Thus the thousands of miles between Paris and the space of “back home,” where there is no question that her interracial relationship would render her unsafe, seem to disappear in an instant, and Eden’s location becomes a familiar one of unfreedom. Notably, her sense of herself as unfree is haunted by the warning voice of her late father, whose words point out both the historical price of so-called freedom—in Western conceptions of liberty, “somebody somewhere” must be the “nigger” in order for others to perceive themselves as free—and the irony that Eden’s location-based sense of herself as a “free woman” has proven largely illusory. No matter where she is in the world, she brings the “territory” of her black body and the “traces of history” that accrue to it.35 The where of black class privilege quickly becomes, for Eden, nowhere at all.

Respatializing the Black and Bourgeois Subject Abroad

At the conclusion of the tribunal evaluating whether Bertrand has slept with Kene, Bertrand is found guilty. His own journals are used as evidence against him (196), and while the group concludes that Kene manipulated Bertrand to her own ends, this manipulation is less important to the group of men judging Bertrand than his own seeming complicity: “Yes, Kene used charms, but the question is, did she need them?” (200). Bertrand’s final, frenzied attempt to counter the accusations not only proves fruitless but returns, obliquely, to the fear of racial terror that motivated his journey away from the States in the first place:

I dream that I flip through the pages with my sweaty hands and look for a passage that I think would help me. I can’t find anything. Everything I read seems to suggest that I really did want the man’s wife. I did, and I didn’t. What I really wanted was to be in a relationship that the world wouldn’t despise. (201)

Bertrand’s desire for Kene, in other words, like his desire to “vanish” into a fantasized African jungle, is in truth a desire for both racial anonymity and an accompanying geographical asylum. Kene represents “the corporeity of his dreams” (77) because he imagines—naively—her black body as safe harbor for his own, just as he has imagined Africa more generally as a place where his blackness would mark neither hypervisibility nor invisibility but rather a sort of collective safety that Bertrand, raised in a “white world” (178), has never known.

As the tribunal concludes, however, Bertrand’s body is deeply in danger; not only does he come to understand that “they have [his] life in their hands” (203)—a realization that precipitates first a desperate attempt to escape and then a disingenuous confession “to everything” (203)—but his punishment is a crude circumcision, performed against Bertrand’s will by the aggrieved party, Alaine. While this circumcision is again framed as a question of masculinity (“I could have made you a woman, but I decided to make you a man. Go in peace” [204]), it nonetheless operates as a violation and a deadly threat against Bertrand’s life. When Bertrand fights to break free from the men who hold him down for the act, Alaine’s friend Allasambe warns, “Berdt, if you struggle, he might miss and kill you” (204). Thus, Bertrand’s sense that the space of Dakar, or of West Africa more broadly, might provide a safe haven for him as endangered black American is shattered by this disfigurement of his body. The circumcision, enacted by the very community he imagined could protect him, is a sexualized violation accompanied by the not-so-subtle threat of actual death.

The end of Bertrand’s story suggests that his journey from the United States to Dakar has ultimately done little to assuage his deep-seated fear of racialized violence. In fact, the “sleeping sickness” that he is only beginning to overcome as he recuperates in a hospital at the conclusion of the novel—alluded to in the work’s title, He Sleeps, and throughout the story, as both narration and other characters reveal that Bertrand “sleep[s] all the time” (207)—suggests a deeper meaning for Bertrand’s somnolent lack of awareness. Bertrand sleeps because he is unwilling to face the truth of his existence as a black American subject. Even at the end of the text he believes that to recognize and admit to himself the depths of American racism—like that of the “White Knight” who writes to a college friend of Bertrand’s, a white woman who preferred black men, that he could only “think about [the black man’s] King Kong dick in her white pussy” (209)—is somehow to embrace its logic: “You can’t be aware of a thing without in some small, subtle, deeply subconscious way believing it, no matter how it may contradict truth or mother wit” (210). Bertrand’s groundless shame, his irrational belief in the truth of the “White Knight’s” fantasy that interracial couples were “only walking cunts and cocks” (210), reveals that he, still, sleeps.

Eden, by contrast, arrives at self-awareness, and something we might call empowerment, by the end of Black Girl in Paris—despite also enduring a sexualized crisis of embodiment. She is not violated in the same way that Bertrand is, but her body, and particularly her body as commodified and sexualized object, becomes increasingly at stake in the text, culminating in circumstances that she finds not only humiliating but dangerous. The book’s penultimate chapter, “artist’s model II: vence,” describes Eden’s final paid position in France, her second turn as an artist’s model. Here she works for an older, wealthy white painter named Jake, whom she recognizes as “bad news” (228) the first time he casually touches her: “I felt a chill run down my spine. It felt like a warning, but I brushed it aside” (227). Still obsessed with fulfilling her own dreams of finding a writerly voice in France, Eden once again accepts an exploitative situation in order to stay in the country just a bit longer. Shortly after meeting her, Jake invites her to be part of an “erotic art film” for extra money, again a sexual boundary that she is unwilling to cross: “He called them erotic but they were nasty any way you looked at them. . . . Erotic to him meant women humiliated, submissive, spread open for his pleasure” (228). And while Eden refuses this request of Jake’s with the narrative aside “He knew I needed money, but I was not as desperate as that” (228), the text has already highlighted Eden’s desperation via an apparent willingness, only a few short weeks before she meets Jake, to enter into prostitution.

In “thief,” the chapter of the novel immediately preceding “artist’s model II: vence,” Eden’s friend and unconsummated queer love interest, a young Bajan woman, painter, and hustler named Lucienne, teaches her “how to get by” with a list of prescriptions under the heading “how to be a whore (if all else fails)” (201). In fact, in the chapter preceding “thief,” titled “english teacher,” Eden is relieved to discover that a man she thinks is soliciting her for sex (“We crossed the street and soon came to a small hotel. He started inside. I stopped in my tracks, realizing the kind of place it was and the kind of girl he thought I was. I started to cry” [184]) actually wants to hire her to converse with him in English (185). Yet despite her dismayed reaction, Eden has followed the man to his hotel knowing that he might be seeking a prostitute (“I didn’t want to understand what the man was asking for” [183]) precisely because she “needed money so badly” (183) and the man had promised to pay her. Thus the novel presents, chronologically, a gradual and progressive breakdown of Eden’s limits as her financial circumstances deteriorate. Despite her efforts to hold on to agency, Eden’s increasingly literal embodiment of the fantasy status of “starving artist,” as she is stripped of her material privileges in Paris, makes her black and female flesh more and more vulnerable to exploitation and potential violation.

Indeed, this moment in Black Girl in Paris recalls another post-soul text, Z. Z. Packer’s 2003 short story “Geese,” in which Dina, another young, precariously classed black woman, travels abroad, in this case to Japan, and eventually finds herself financially desperate, unable to survive except via sex work.36 Both Packer’s and Youngblood’s texts remind us that for black women abroad, particularly in non-black spaces, the racist history of framing black women’s bodies as hypersexualized commodities makes prostitution and other sex work the always available solution to material precarity, a solution that is also, often, a crisis. By the time Eden becomes one of “Jake’s girls” (229) she has avoided having to “choose” prostitution but believes herself to be in physical danger of a different sort:

I wondered what my mother would think of her little girl if she saw me stretched out naked, mauled by the eyes of a drunken hairy beast. I wondered if she would have understood why I wanted to meet Baldwin so badly. Nothing had prepared me for that moment in that dusty room with cobwebs lacing the corners. At first I wondered if I would have to do battle with him and run naked down the marble staircase and into the square below filled with plane trees, old pensioners, and tourists sipping beer through straws. (229)

Eden fears being raped by Jake, but she also is reminded, in this moment of fear, of her mother’s judgment, the class training in respectable decorum that Eden’s very presence on Jake’s sofa disrupts. Yet this class training has not “prepared” her for actual racialized and gendered precarity, precipitated by her assumed poverty—a precarity that she is willing to “battle” through for the sake of her writerly dreams. Here, again, Eden recognizes that her mother’s approval, and being “respectable,” cannot supersede her desire to find herself as a writer. When a friend of “Jimmy’s” stops by Jake’s home for a beer and reveals that Baldwin “was not well, that he was not in St. Paul De Vence just over the hills from where we were sitting . . . but that he was in Paris working on an upcoming theater production of The Amen Corner” (231), Eden’s stunned “panic” motivates her to leave Jake’s sexualized exploitation behind for good. Instead, she “slip[s] away unnoticed” and returns to her desk, as “between [her] tears words began to bloom on the page, one after the other” (231).

Crucially, this moment in which Eden finds her writerly voice is framed as one of geography—of mapping. Eden writes to understand the where of her life up to this moment:

The maps I’d made were guides to my interior. I remembered all the places I’d been, all the things I’d seen, and I caught them in my imagination. Jimmy was with me and Langston too. I wrote to understand where I had been, where I was going, to make sense of the world that had led me to the small room on the edge of the abyss. (231–32)

And although she finally realizes that “There was power in the pen” and even that “I didn’t need Jimmy to tell me that” (232), Baldwin remains for her a powerful symbol of the where of writerly freedom. Not coincidentally, when she encounters Baldwin on her last day in Paris, his inadvertent gift to her is also a map, this time a literal one. After Baldwin, visibly ill, “frail and weak” (235), recognizes her need for his benediction and gently embraces her in the street, he departs with his aide in a taxi. A waiter from the restaurant he has just left rushes out and hands Eden something Baldwin had left behind—a map of London, with “words . . . scrawled across the lines of the map like directions” (236).

Eden, who at the start of the novel is unable to think of herself as a writer, instead imagining herself as a cartographer (“I was a mapmaker” [2]), by the conclusion of the text comes to understand that “a story is like a map” (227), both in its rendering of worlds we know and its status as guide to worlds we have not yet seen. It is no coincidence that the map she inherits from Baldwin is of London, not Paris—hinting, perhaps, at another destination for Eden the newly minted writer. Baldwin’s “small and wild” (236) words scribbled across the map operate as markings across space and time, guidelines for Eden’s passage into creative maturity.

Thus we might view Eden’s negotiation of space in Paris, and her literal mapping of the city and her own experience of it through her writing, as what McKittrick calls a “respatialization”—of questions of European mastery, colonial power, and even writerly voice. McKittrick notes that “if practices of subjugation are also spatial acts, then the ways in which black women think, write, and negotiate their surroundings are intermingled with place-based critiques, or, respatializations.”37 Eden’s mapping of Paris via her labor poignantly underscores the price that she must pay to come to voice:

“You have to make sacrifices to be an artist,” [mentor and onetime lover] Indego had said the last time I saw him.

I will keep one of the blurry photographs [taken by Jake] to remind me of my sacrifice. Though my flesh will remember and though my flesh will fade away, my mind will remember. (229)

Eden carries her sacrifices with her, in her very flesh, but recognizes that such corporeal sacrifices are only valuable if she can carry them in her mind, as well, and use them in her work. In this way, Youngblood’s novel reminds us of the price black women pay for their own and others’ liberty. Bertrand, despite beginning to “stay awake for longer periods of time” (207), remains asleep to many of the spatial and geopolitical systems that privilege him in the Senegalese context, unable to critique these systems as they affect him and those around him—indeed, he instead readily occupies a colonizing position via his work as a budding anthropologist, one seemingly unable to turn his critical gaze inward. But Eden’s coming to writerly voice is a spatial as well as affective transformation—“I had found a path on my interior map and learned to follow it”—that allows her to understand that the freedom she has been seeking must be earned through her own and others’ sacrifice:

For Eden, the physical journey to Paris precipitates an interior journey through a landscape of her own conscious making, one that—unlike Bertrand’s unconscious dreamscape—is mindful of the multiple and intersecting geographies and communities that constitute her as middle-class black writer and black American woman abroad.

In the next chapter I turn to another early twenty-first-century post-soul text about a writer, this time an established one: Percival Everett’s Erasure, a work preoccupied with questions of both interiority and futurity. Everett’s text forces us to question the very logic upon which the ontological opposition between black and bourgeois rests, and challenges the notion of a raceless future.