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By Root 331 0

Rouge. My songs were well enough received and fans were beginning to remember me. Some sent notes and occasionally flowers to my dressing room. A few expatriates and two Senegalese students I had met advised me to leave Porgy and Bess and make my mark in Paris. The Africans said that in France I would never hear of lynchings and riots. And I would not be refused service in any restaurant or hotel in the country. The people were civilized. And, anyway the French people loved Negroes. Look at Sid Bechet. Lil Armstrong, a former wife of Satchmo, played piano at Le Jazz Hot and had an avid following. Bambi, a tall, deliciously thin model, could hardly walk the streets in Paris without men following her and raving over her Black beauty. Nancy Holloway and Inez, who owned Chez Inez, sang American songs as well as popular French melodies and were welcomed with hyperbolic Gallic admiration. And, of course, Josephine Baker was a national institution.

I considered the advice seriously. I could find an apartment and send for Clyde. He was bright and would learn the language quickly. He would be freed from growing up under the cloud of racial prejudice that occasionally made every Black childhood sunless. He would be obliged to be good for his own sake rather than to prove to a disbelieving society that he was not a brute. The French students wore short pants and blazers and caps, and I knew my son would look beautiful in his uniform. The prospect looked glorious.

A woman asked me to join her table after my show at the Rose Rouge. She welcomed me and introduced me to her friends.

Her voice was tiny but piercing, and a baby-doll smile never left her pink-and-white face, and her eyelids fluttered only a little faster than her hands. She reminded me of Billie Burke and very small door chimes.

“Mademoiselle, do you know who is Pierre Mendès-France?” Smile, blink, rustle.

I said, “Yes, madame. I read the papers.”

“I want an affair for him to give.” Her English was not broken, it was crippled.

I said in French, “Madame, let us speak French.”

She bubbled and gurgled. “Non. Non. I love this English for practice to speak.”

Alors. She limped along verbally, explaining that she wanted me to sing at a reception which she planned to host. It would be a fund-raising event and they would gladly pay me for my services. I would be expected to sing two songs. Something plaintive that would move the heart, I thought, and loosen the purse strings.

“The blues.” Madame said, “Oh, how the blues I love. Will you sing ‘St. Louie Blues’?” She started singing the first line: “I hate to see, that evening sun go down.”

Her shoulders hunched up to her ear lobes and she made her eyes small and lascivious. Her lips pushed out and I saw the red underlining of her mouth.

“‘I hate to see that evening sun go down.’”

She shook herself and her breasts wobbled. She was imitating her idea of a négresse.

I stopped her. “Madame, I know the song. I will sing it at the reception.”

She was not fazed by the interruption, but clapped her hands and told her friends to clap theirs. We agreed on a price, and she said, “You are with Porgy and Bess. The great opera. If Bess or Porgy or your friends desire to come with you at the reception, they will not be made to pay.”

She smiled, laughed, waved her hands and generally jangled like a bunch of keys. I thanked her and left the table.

Since my friends in Porgy and Bess were otherwise engaged, I asked the two Senegalese men to escort me to the reception. They were pleased to do so and appeared at the theater's backstage door in tuxedos, starched shirts and highly polished shoes. Their general elegance put me in a party mood. I walked into the salon with a handsome, attentive man on each side, and as we stopped inside the door, I felt that the three of us must have made an arresting tableau.

Madame was informed of my arrival and she floated over in wisps of chiffon, smiling her cheeks into small pink balloons.

“Oh, mademoiselle. How it is kind of you to come.” She offered me her hand, but gave her eyes to my escorts.