Visiting the European Homes of James Baldwin, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Ed Clark, and More Black Expats

Perhaps because he wasn’t able to move abroad, my father has recorded dozens of conversations with members of the African diaspora. It became a hobby. He interviewed Afro Germans in Berlin soon after the poet Audre Lorde encouraged young people in that community to seek each other out; the actress Marpessa Dawn, who moved to France as a young woman and costarred in the Academy Award–winning film, Black Orpheus (1959); the poet James Emanuel, pioneer of the “jazz haiku.” Sometimes this hobby overlapped with our family trips. Our vacation videos, which might begin with a shot of me as a toddler riding a carousel, would invariably cut to a half-hour-long conversation with a young man from Martinique who had made the innocent mistake of disembarking from his motorcycle in front of my father. We probably made our way to the Eiffel Tower or Trevi Fountain—I honestly can’t remember—but what I can recall is a trip to Italy in the early ’90s during which we visited a freckled woman named Daniella, a Black ballerina who had danced with Rudolf Nureyev in the late ’80s and lived with two gigantic black dogs amid an apple orchard in Assisi. The life stories he has collected, which he recites over and over again like a mantra or epic poem, are iterations of paths his life might have taken. As if by knowing them, he gets to live them all.

Al Thomas was an opera singer. I remember sitting on his rooftop patio in the early ’90s, strewn with plant vines, as the sounds of Rome traffic buzzed pleasantly below. In the staticky VHS tape that I recently digitized, Thomas wears sunglasses and a white sport jacket with an Italian soccer patch on the shoulder. His speaking voice hovers just above baritone. He toured in the 1950s with the Everyman Opera, performing Porgy and Bess in countries ranging from Russia to Venezuela, a cultural exchange funded by the U.S. State department and the Soviet Union with the express aim of softening the tensions of the Cold War. A young Maya Angelou was part of the cast. Truman Capote wrote about the Everyman Opera after traveling with them to St. Petersburg in a 1956 piece for The New Yorker called “The Muses Are Heard.” Thomas told my father he was annoyed at Capote for largely ignoring the Black cast, and for crafting, instead, an entertaining travelogue about the wardrobe and the chitchat of the wealthy, white wives—Leonore Gershwin and Wilva Breen—who had come along. Capote does a fine job of recounting the dissonance and, sometimes, outright racism inflecting interactions between the cast and their Russian audience. He notes, with humor, how the Russians expressed their feelings about capitalism in their treatment of the cast and crew—the Astoria Hotel “had arrived at their system of room distribution by consulting Everyman Opera’s payroll: ‘The less you get, the more they give you.’”

In one of few observations about the cast, Capote describes a moment with Rhoda Boggs, who played the Strawberry Woman, and whose name sent Thomas into a nostalgic swoon. Capote encounters Boggs after she has attended an Evangelical Baptist church service in Russia, “her little Sunday-best hat was slightly askew and the handkerchief she kept dabbing at her eyes was wet as a washcloth.” Boggs told Capote, “The pastor, a sweet old man, he asked the interpreter to ask us colored people would we render a spiritual, and they listened so quiet, all those rows and rows and rows of old faces just looking at us.” She describes their departure: “They took out white handkerchiefs and waved them in the air. And they sang ‘God Be With You Till We Meet Again’ with their own words. The tears were just pouring down our faces, them and ours. Oh, child, it churned me up. I’m all tore to pieces.”

In my father’s recording of Thomas, he asks how Thomas feels about leaving the struggle of Black life in the United States. Thomas is remorseful. He recalls the stories he heard as a child, from elders who fought in World War I, and wonders who will pass these tales on to his many nieces and nephews. At the same time, he recalls the limitations that sent him searching for freedom abroad. He explains that a white man, down on his luck in skid row, can put on a suit and get whatever life he wants. He’s got it made. But for a Black man in America, “We can put on all kinds of suits. We ain’t got nothin’ made.” He voices these words as though summoning a character from Porgy and Bess, a deviation from his otherwise near-Shakespearean manner of expression. It is difficult to imagine that this openly gay opera singer whose apartment overlooked an ancient city would have found the same level of artistic or spiritual fulfillment had he stayed at home.

In the mid-’90s, on a different trip, my father took me with him on a visit to the home of the writer and sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud. I recall a parkside apartment imbued with elegance, bringing to mind the impossibly fashionable Black American singer in the film Diva, who strolls through Luxembourg Gardens during the blue hour of twilight with a gold umbrella in the rain. Chase-Riboud was born in Philadelphia in 1939. The Museum of Modern Art acquired a woodcut of hers when she was 15 years old. After she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Temple University, she studied at the American Academy in Rome. Early in her artistic life, Chase-Riboud encountered freedom fighters and Black Panthers at a pan-African festival in postcolonial Algiers, where, she says, “a kind of historical current brought all these people together in a context that was not only political but artistic.”