Letter to Jimmy by Alain Mabanckou Page B

about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert. Did another book, in company with photographer Theodore Pelatowski, about the store-front churches in Harlem. This book met exactly the same fate as my first—fellowship, but no sale.” 31
    Greenwich Village is the site of a burgeoning African-American culture, for young people who want to change the world with their dreams. In this place, daily life resembles their destiny: unstable, wandering, but with no lack of projects. It is a community founded on team-work. Thanks to Delaney, you develop your artistic awareness, and your passion for music, above all for blues and jazz. Even though you have been imagining it for a while, it is Emile Capouya who convinces you to definitively abandon preaching. You are seventeen.
    With only a high school diploma, it is not exactly as if your future is laid out before you. Your craft requires certain sacrifices with which you comply. You take on odd jobs in Greenwich Village until your father’s death. As destiny would have it, on the day of your father’s passing, on July 29, 1943, your sister Paula is born.
    At the Calypso restaurant, where you work as a waiter, you see a lot of people come and go. Most of the biggest writers and artists of the day come to dine here. Your homosexuality is no longer a secret to anyone, and you even come out to your protector, Emile Capouya. During this time, you also begin writing what will become your first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and you meet your mentor, Richard Wright, to whom you will submit a number of pages from your manuscript, for the first time. You read everything you can get your hands on. You devour European literature; you are seduced by Balzac, James, Flaubert, and Dostoyevsky, among others . . .
    1946 is made the darkest of years with the suicide of your friend Eugene Worth, to whom you never had the chance to reveal your feelings. This dramatic event affects you, and is one of the reasons that speed up your departure from your country.
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    In 1948, at the age of twenty-four, you dream of leaving behind everything that is dear to you, of leaving America—your homeland—because, according to you, “it was necessary.” You want to follow the trail blazed before you by black American artists and writers no longer willing to endure the abuses inflicted upon them by a systemof politically sanctioned racial segregation. These artists and writers had exported their cultural movement, the Harlem Renaissance, to Paris, finding in the French capital and “in the excitement of the cabarets what used to seduce them in Harlem: the vibrating pulse of new cultural blood.” 32 The wave of these black migrants is impressive, and includes poets you frequent and novelists you admire, like William Du Bois and Langston Hughes, but also stars of the stage, among whom Josephine Baker is the most famous. France should, theoretically, allow you to escape from your demeaning status of Black American Man. However, you do not renounce your country: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” 33
    And so, some time later, while visiting the United States after an absence of several years, you are asked by the media about your adopted country. You make no concessions to her: you say you could just as easily live somewhere in Africa, Asia, or in the Third World. Later, you would, in fact, go on to live in Turkey and in Switzerland . . . But you have friends in France, even if this country, according to you, is a “hermetic” place, often marked by arrogance and “smugness” among its intellectuals and elite class. Still, you love France more than ever, and you certainly do not want to speak badly of a former lover, one who took you in her arms, openedher doors to you,