Destination Paris 2020
Paris Lit Up is honored to present this piece by Dr. Florence Ladd, an academic, novelist, and activist, whose career spans more than sixty years. The retired director of the Bunting Institute at Harvard-Radcliffe, she is a psychologist and author of the novels, “Sarah’s Psalm” and “The Spirit of Josephine.” Currently, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
While packing my household goods for shipping, I am interrupted by telephone calls from friends. “Are you really moving abroad?” “Is it wise at your age?” “How can you give up your life in Cambridge?” “Why move when we’re making progress on racial matters?”
I am in sound health and at age eighty-eight, if not now – when? My husband died six months ago. My only child, poet/musician Michael Ladd, has been in Paris since 2003. He and his translator wife, Fanny, live in the 9th arrondissement with their two children. I want a closer connection to my adolescent grandchildren. Weekly visits via Zoom are not entirely satisfying. And admittedly, I want relief from my profound emotional involvement in the struggle for racial justice and my distress about political responsibility and civility in the United States.
Her novel “Sarah's Psalm” (Scribner, 1996) received the 1997 Literary Award for Fiction from the American Library Association's Black Caucus.
Considering my family situation, moving to Paris seems inevitable. Not only inevitable, it seems preordained. On my twelfth birthday, I told my parents that I intended to go to Paris before I turned twenty. Neither my father nor my mother had ever been abroad. Dad was amused and, at the same time, proud of my ambition. Mom took me seriously; she also took me shopping for a Moroccan leather shoulder bag for the trip.
In my junior year at Howard University, I was awarded a fellowship for travel. I proposed “observing psychological test procedures in clinics for children in France.” With additional funds from my parents, and a letter of introduction from Professor James A. Bayton to Professor Henri Wallon at the Sorbonne, I embarked. In May 1952, aboard a ship of college students, the Moroccan leather shoulder bag at my hip, I waved au revoir to my parents. The destination of the crossing was Le Harve. From there, I took a train to Paris where I found accommodations in a gloomy student hotel on rue Cujas in the 5th arrondissement. Around the corner was the Sorbonne, where I presented my letter of introduction to the venerable, bearded Professor Wallon. On it he wrote: Dr. Nadine Galifret-Granjon, clinic at Hôpital Henri Roussel.
The clinic's receptionist presented me to Dr. Galifret-Granjon. Her warm smile, alert blue eyes, and lyrical voice welcomed me. She was in her late-thirties. In French, she talked about dyslexia. When she realized I wasn’t following, in English she began an inquiry into my competence. She discovered that my French was deficient; and that I knew little about child psychology. With more questions, she learned that I also knew nothing about cuisine, wine, and contemporary art; and that I was misinformed about Communism and unaware of existentialism. Her eyes filled with pity, and I became her project!
She introduced me to her colleagues with enthusiasm about the arrival of an American student – a black American from a black university in America. I was flattered. I was also apprehensive about being an observer in the clinic; and even more apprehensive about having my shortcomings observed.
Nadine gave me a schedule of cases to monitor. She also proposed a schedule of events to take in after clinic hours. On several occasions, she invited me to join her and her colleagues for an apéritif. Nadine’s style impressed me. In conversation with colleagues she was precise; with children, she was reassuring. After work hours, at cafés, she was an uncompromising intellectual, debating ideas with men and other women. I viewed her as a model professional woman.
To be sure, growing up in segregated Washington, D.C., I had encountered professional women – all black. In those days, my mother, an elementary school teacher, was my nearest model of professionalism. I admired many women teachers in the public schools I attended. At Howard I had a few women professors, but none in psychology. In those relationships, I was not accorded treatment as an adult with ideas that mattered. That my recognition of my maturity and awakening of my intellectual being occurred in Paris, explains my initial attachment to the city.
With few African American women in Paris in 1952, my race was an asset. It offered occasions for conversations with Parisians curious about my experience of segregation and discrimination. Strangers often asked, “D’où êtes vous?” When I replied, “America” or, as I began to say, “les États Unis,” I was drawn into café discussions about the United States’ treatment of (les Noirs) blacks and my personal experience. Once I was “picked up” on Boul’ Mich by a family – a couple with three children – and invited to join them for their Sunday déjeuner in a Latin quarter restaurant. I hardly ate because I was too preoccupied with answering their ceaseless questions: “Was slavery still practiced in America?” “Could blacks go to museums with whites?” “Were churches segregated?” “What was the president’s position on the condition of blacks?”
Nadine’s associates knew about the history of U.S. slavery. They talked about the malevolence of capitalism, threat of McCarthyism, and the works of then-exiled Richard Wright. They also adored Mahalia Jackson’s every chord.
For Richard Wright, Paris was “a perch from which to examine” his native land. Inspired by Wright, I began to examine the complexity and contradiction of race and to question the value of my citizenship in the United States. Regarded as “American” in Paris stirred my discomfort.
Decades of travel abroad sharpened my perspective on national character, social class and race. Living in Turkey in the early 1960s, specifically in Istanbul where I taught at Robert College, afforded exposure to an Islamic culture with gender segregation shaping social and economic relations. In India, surveying Oxfam America projects, I recognized the complex dynamics of color, caste, class and religion.
As a graduate student in upstate New York, I struggled with racism. For much of my life in New England, I have protested, picketed, and marched for freedom and justice. Enough! I’m moving to Paris.
I am not moving to the Paris of 1952. Paris in 2020 is much more cosmopolitan, under clouds of pandemic predicament, socio-economic protests, and now the Black Lives Matter movement. Race and religion are salient aspects of discrimination. The history of slavery in France is under study; and liberté, égalité, fraternité ring as paradoxical slogans to people of color. Class resistance of les gilets jaunes is challenging the country’s aspirations.
Currently, I’m trying out terms to describe my future status: immigrant, expatriate, or simply living abroad. Expatriates often renounce allegiance to one's native country. I’ve never felt true allegiance. I’ll be content with living in Paris.
Where in Paris? My son said, “Your friends live on the Left Bank in the 5th, 6th and 7th, Mom, but you can’t afford to live there. Besides, we want you within walking distance of our place.” They live in the 9th, near Place Saint Georges. Their market street, rue des Martyrs, gained literary fame in “The Only Street in Paris” by Elaine Sciolino. My favorite hairdresser, Bettina’s Hair Élégance, is around the corner on rue Clauzel.
In 1963, an epoch comparable to this period, with respect to political upheaval, I was ambivalent about returning to the U.S. My sentiments, published in the “Negro Digest,” included this exchange:
With the inflection of surprise, the young Turkish woman said, “Well, you are the very first American I have ever met who was not looking forward to going home.” Then came her candid second thought, “But you are the first American black I have known.” I considered my bleak past as a Negro in America and the uncertain future for me and my generation of blacks. “Of course, my color has a great deal to do with my reluctance, my dread of returning to the United States.” I did not speak of my returning as “going home.”
On the flight from Boston to Paris, will I feel I’m going home? No, I’ll be leaving the country to which I’ve had an attachment my entire life. It is the country where my first-generation emancipated grandfathers worked at menial jobs to ensure sturdy foundations for my parents. They, in turn, with their best efforts, afforded my son and me the privilege of choosing how and where we want to live. I’ll leave with gratitude for their sacrifices carrying baggage loaded with the ongoing struggle against U.S. racism and distress about the nation’s destiny.