My French teacher’s pre-war holidays in Martinique spoke now less of the attractions of the island than of the hardness of the world at that time for black people.
IN THE country where I was in former French West Africa the people I got to know were expatriates. The Africans were in their own country and lived their own lives. The advertisements of the rich city were in French and the traffic signs on the highways suggested France; but the Africans also had their own language, their own families, clans, ethnies, religious practices, their own totems and household gods, their own instinctive reverences. You could meet Africans and talk about the economy and the presidential succession; but afterwards they could retreat to areas of the spirit where you couldn’t follow them.
It was curiously exciting, the thought of that complete and very old other life out there. But for friendship, for dinner companions, for people with whom you drove out to the beach on Sundays, you depended on the expatriates. They were mainly French and Americans. There were also some French West Indian women, in their thirties or forties, from Martinique and Guadeloupe. These women had gone from their islands to Paris. There they had formed the African connections that had brought them here. Now for a variety of reasons they were unattached.
I had never thought that French West Indian women might be a type or a special group. Now I saw that they were different from the black or brown West Indian women I knew: their world-picture was different. The French West Indian women were set apart by the very language that had attracted my French teacher to Martinique and the French islands in the 1930s and 1940s. In those days my teacher had sought to escape not so much from the English language as from its hard racial associations. In the French language of Martinique he could find a whole new idea of himself.
Now it worked the other way. The French language restricted the people of Martinique and Guadeloupe to a special French-speaking world. It shut them off from the other islands and the rest of the continent. Their thoughts were of Paris; legally they were full citizens of France. But the Paris they went to was not the city of light. It was the black immigrant world of that city, which was like a constricted version of home; and from there some of the women went to Africa, following the attachments they had made in their version of Paris. Strange zigzag, in part reversing the journey of the slavers of a hundred and fifty years before; now, though, not returning these women to what was theirs, but sending unprotected women of the New World to what was very far away and strange.
In West Africa I had got to know Phyllis. She was in her thirties or early forties, from Guadeloupe, brown rather than black, speaking a clear, delicate-sounding French. She had married an African in Paris. That marriage, like the marriage of many other antillaises to Africans, had broken down almost as soon as she had come to Africa with her husband. It was to the neighbouring country that she had come out. When her marriage had failed she had left that country and come to this one — the French language and the structure of French-speaking Africa had given her at least that room for manoeuvre. She had found a secretarial-librarian’s job in one of the embassies, and was more than able to look after herself.
She was part of the expatriate group I moved in. I saw her everywhere, at every dinner party, on every Sunday beach excursion (her hair straightened out by the sea, drying to salt on her freshly burnt skin), at every cultural occasion which the foreign embassies laid on, officially for the local African audience, but in reality for the expatriate community. She knew many people, was stylish and self-possessed, was outgoing and generous; but she appeared to have no partner or special friend.
Such energy in going out! It was disquieting, after a time. I felt she didn’t like going back to her flat, and this made me feel she didn’t like being in the Africa she had found herself in. I wondered whether she hadn’t thought of going back to Guadeloupe. I asked her one day. She said she hated the island; it was so small; the people were so small-minded, content with so little. The only other place she could think of — and it was the only other thing she had known — was the version of Paris she had lived in. And she didn’t want to go back to Paris. So she stayed where she was, and went out.
I discovered also that there was a certain fluidity to her character. She could adapt her behaviour to the company. She might appear to agree when people complained about African behaviour (accepting invitations to formal dinners and then not turning up, not coming to cultural evenings at the embassies). But then on another day, when we were alone, she might say, “Why should an African want to leave his house and come to a room and sit with all these foreigners and hear someone play the violin? If they would just think about it, they would see it is a foolish thing to ask people to do. The life that Africans have among themselves is so beautiful — they should be trying to find out about that, but they don’t want to know.”
She began to talk one day about Lebrun’s visit to French-speaking West Africa. He was someone we had in common. She thought of him as a fellow antillais. She was critical; she hadn’t committed herself until she felt she knew me. I had heard a lot from various people, but in an imprecise way, about his behaviour. I had heard about his rage.
Phyllis said, “Something happened here, in the capital, when he came. Something happened to him. He wasn’t happy here. He came with his daughter. She was almost white. Did you know that? She wasn’t like him physically. She was very big. She was like a wall, like that door. I think there was some unhappiness there. She lived with her mother. This trip with Lebrun was like a holiday for her.”
“How old was this daughter?”
“Twenty-four, twenty-five.”
Perhaps then her mother had been the calm, attractive woman, Polish or Czech, I had seen with Lebrun in the Maida Vale flat, the woman whose friends I had been sent to in New York later.
I said, “I believe I met her mother.”
“She left him. That’s the story here. She became bored with his communism, and she had the money. The people in the movement begged her to go back for the sake of the movement.”
“Was there somebody else?”
“Obviously there was somebody else. She is a woman. Lebrun went crazy.”
“The other man was black or white?”
“Lebrun didn’t know for a long time.”
“Which would he have minded more?”
“That was the thing. I don’t think Lebrun knew what would have hurt him more. He became very racial-minded when he was here. He insulted quite a few white people for no reason at all. There was something here he didn’t like. What was it? He never absolutely said. It’s a rich city. You see that. It’s not what you think of when you think of an African city. It’s not only rich, but elegant. I don’t think he actually liked that. All the cars, all the shops, all the auto-routes. I suppose it made him feel poor and unwanted. He made his objections political, or tried to. He talked about blacks selling out, about capitalism and imperialism. But do you know what I feel? I feel he expected people to be as excited about his white daughter as he was. He didn’t know Africans. They are strong people. And they are cruel. There was a lampoon in the university paper after he made that famous and shameful scene about French men with their black girl friends. A cartoon. The white daughter saying to the old black man in English, ‘Daddy, why don’t we leave these Negroes and go home?’