What are calendars to you?And, indeed, what are atlases? Time is cool jazz in Bretagne,you, hidden in berets or eccentric scarves,somewhere over the rainbow .-where you are tin-men requiring hearts,lion-men demanding courage,scarecrow-men needing minds all your ownafter DuBois made blackness respectable. Geography is brown girls in Parisin the spring by the restless Seineflowing like blood in chic, African colonies;Josephine Baker on your bebop phonographsin the lonely, brave, old rented rooms;Gallic wines shocking you out of yourselves,leaving you as abandonedas obsolete locomotives whimpering Leadbelly bluesin lonesome Shantytown, U.SA.
What are borders/frontiers to you?In actual seven-league sandals,you ride Monet's shimmering waterlilies --in your street-artist imaginations .-across the sky darkened,here and there, by Nazi shadows,Krupp thunderclouds,and, in other places, by Americanswho remind youthat you are niggers,even if you have read Victor Hugo. Night is winged Ethiopia in the distance,rising on zeta beams of radio free Europe,bringing you in for touchdown at Orleans;or, it is strange, strychnine streetwalkers,fleecing you for an authentic Negro poemor rhythm and blues salutation.This is your life .-lounging with Richard Wright in Matisse-greenparks, facing nightmares of contortedlynchers every night. Every night.
Scatalogical ragtime reggae haunts the cavernsof le métro. You pick up English languagenewspapers and TIME magazines,learn that this one was arrested,that one assassinated;fear waking .- like Gregor Samsa .-in the hands of a mob;lust for a black Constance Chatterley,not even knowing thatall Black people not residing in Africaare kidnap victims. After all, how can you be an expatriateof a country that wasnever yours?
Pastel paintings on Paris pavement,wall-posters Beardsley-styled:you pause and admire them all;and France entrances youwith its kaleidoscope cafés,chain-smoking intelligentsia,absinthe and pernod poets.... Have you ever seen postcardsof Alabama or Auschwitz,Mussolini or Mississippi? It is unsafe to wallow in Ulyssean dreams,genetic theories, vignettes of Gertrude Stein,Hemingway, other maudlin moderns,while the godless globedetonates its war heart, loosinggoose stepping geniusesand dark, secret labs.
Perhaps I suffer aphasia.I know not how to talk to you.I send you greetings from Afriqueand spirituals of catholic Negritude. Meanwhile, roses burst like red stars,a flower explodes for a special sister.You do not accept gravity in Francewhere everything floats on the premisethat the earth will rise to meet itthe next day;where the Eiffel Tower bends over backwardsto insult the Statue of Liberty;and a woman in the flesh of the momentsprouts rainbow butterfly wingsand kisses a schizoid sculptorlightly on his full, ruby lips;and an argument is dropped over cocoaby manic mulatto musicianswho hear whispers of Eliot .-or Ellington .-in common prayers.
You have heard Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith.You need no passports.Your ticket is an all-night roomfacing the ivory, voodoo moon,full of Henri Rousseau lions and natives;and your senses, inexplicablyhoming in on gorgeous Ethiopia,while Roman rumours of warfly you home.
