Breaching Jericho's Walls by Ballard Allen B.;

Author:Ballard, Allen B.; [BALLARD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3407126
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2011-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

XVII

France held for black people a great wonder and mystique. From my childhood with Uncle Jerry and the other black veterans—Plink and Wardy—I'd learned to love the French. By the time I was five years old, I could sing “Mademoiselle from Armentières, Parlez-Vous?”

My Uncle Jerry used to brag about the bravery of the fierce Senegalese fighters, how the French treated them as their own, and how the French people had embraced African American soldiers when white Americans shunned them. My favorite subject at Central High had been French. Although aware of certain linguistic deficiencies, I was eager to remedy them and plunge into French life.

I can't express the joy I felt when I first boarded the “boat train” that took us into the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Disembarking was easy, and before we knew it, the whole gang was in the dining car of the train, on our way to Paris.

I still remember that first meal with crusty French bread, butter that tasted as if it'd just come from a cow, the tasty pâté, the light and elegant wines, salads with fresh tomatoes soaked just right in a vinaigrette dressing, the café au lait that completed our meal, and the courtesy and kindness of the French waiters, who were oblivious to our color. All along the way, when we'd stop at a station, young French children would wave, just out of sheer happiness at seeing us.

It was heady stuff for a young black man. Wasn't France a place where they actually had black legislators in the Assemblée Nationale and black public administrators serving throughout the empire? Had not General De Gaulle's Free French movement started from Chad with African troops? There was no way I couldn't love France. And who wouldn't love the beauty of the French landscape I saw as our train made its way to Paris.

Upon arrival, all the Fulbright students were briefed: we were to remain in Paris for six weeks of orientation and language instruction at an institute that was a department of the Sorbonne before we headed out to the provinces. I realized I was going to be almost totally dependent on Bob Smith as an interpreter for a while.

Right after the Fulbright briefing, we received our dormitory postings for the orientation period. Bob and the others were staying somewhere in the Latin Quarter, I was to room at the so-called American House in the Cité Universitaire—a large dormitory facility that housed hundreds of foreign students. We took a cab, dropped our bags at our dormitories, and then headed to a café in the Latin Quarter for lunch.

Real Paris at last! The Latin Quarter, the student quarter of Paris, was at that time essentially made up of two avenues. One was the Boulevard St. Michel, which was topped by the famous Luxembourg Gardens. “Boule Mich,” flanked by bookstores and outdoor cafés, descended a hill to its intersection with the Boulevard St. Germaine. If you continued down the Boulevard St. Michel, you'd reach the river Seine with its famous bridges, with Notre Dame on the opposite bank facing you.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.