we returned: down the sandy aisles, parallel to the Rue de Rivoli, and made our way to the museum. Once inside, we walked thoughtfully by each painting.
“How can anyone select a favorite?” Julene whispered.
“I tend toward Manet,” I pointed to his Blonde Woman With Bare Breasts. “Look at her features, her eyes, her gentle face and nose, her breasts. Even the nipples are perfect. And see how the breasts are soft and fleshy and slightly upturned,” I nodded toward the painting. “And look at the gold straw of her hat, and the way she tilts her head. She must have been one of Manet’s mistresses. Look how pink and lifelike here skin is against that green background. He had to know her well. How he must have loved her arms and kisses!”
Julene looked at me with her dark brown eyes and smiled. She pulled on my hand and led me toward Pissarro’s Red Roofs. “Those houses so remind me of old slave cabins on an Alabama plantation in the winter,” she offered.
I stared at the chalky white buildings, their tall chimneys and red and purple roofs, and at the hill above the town. The bare trees in the foreground provided a demure screen, behind which the artist had enclosed his houses. A distinctive grandeur defined the work, without flamboyance or artificiality. As I peered closer, I could see where Pissarro had painted the hill’s meadows different colors, some red, some green, some a pale citron hue, and others blue. There were even blue doors and shutters on the houses. I squeezed her hand, and we walked on.
“You know there are some black artists whose works are comparable to these.”
“I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I can’t name a single black artist.”
“No harm,” she laughed. “Most Whites can’t. But if you ever come across any works by Thomas Benton, buy them if you can. His July Hay is brilliant. Black harvesters with graceful sickles are mowing a field of flaxen hay, bowed in the wind. There is a sweetness of breadth and color about it that only a black person can feel about our race and unending labor. The same is true of Charles Alston’s Deserted House, with its despair of the old South in every brush stroke. Or John Wilson’s Elevated Street Car Scene. It’s a product of World War II. White women on their way home, or to work, are busy chatting in the background. They appear frivolous and distracted; but seated, and starring at you, is a Black man, on his way to his job. His eyes stare at you. They give you no quarter for compromise or distraction. You can only imagine his sufferings, the prejudice he has endured, but he looms amidst those women as a man of greater character than all the city’s Whites, who have never had to suffer, or nurse their hungry children to bed at night.”
“Julene! Listen! Segregation is over. Your life is still ahead of you: a bright and shining future, if you choose it. How old are you, anyway? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?”
“Twenty-eight! And here I am in Paris, in the city I love. With the man I love, but who can’t make love the way I want. Or need him to. And I’m fighting it all the time.”
“Pity does no one good, Julene. And self-pity is even worse. And black, self-pity must be the cruelest embodiment of all. If you want to be an artist, strike out on your own. I hate to say it, but the world is indifferent. It doesn’t care one wit. It knows nothing of purpose. Nor does it fashion our dreams. We are simply on our own.”
“I know that!” she winced. Tears suddenly welled up in her eyes. “You don’t need to tell me that, friend or no friend. Even if it’s true. And my blackness has nothing to do with that.” She stopped and suddenly stared at me with her large soft eyes. “Have you ever had sex with a black girl?” she whispered. “With a real black woman? I mean ‘real.’ Hot, sweaty, panting, and all? Do you know what that’s like? Have you ever felt her heart beating through her back or chest when lying up against her? Or listened to her breathe? Or understood her hunger and desire to be caressed and loved, treated like a lady, even if a whore? Black men understand that, even if they’re worthless, or run away and behave like children. It‘s so damn hard to break free of our cocoon, our black and brown encasements that have nothing to do with our humanness. Do you understand that? Do you?”
I was still holding her hand. I pressed it gently in my own, then brought it up to my lips and kissed it. “No,” I replied in a small voice. “But your color is part of your being, as much as mine is inseparable from me. You’re fine, just as you are. You don’t have to explain that.”
She leaned against me and pressed a cheek against my face. A tear rolled down her own, lodged against my mouth, and trickled onto my tongue. It tasted hot and salty. One of the museum’s guards coughed politely. With embarrassment, we smiled and hurried into an adjoining room. I felt saddened by Julene’s anguish, by her helplessness, if not, somehow, partially to blame for it myself.
We ambled past numerous paintings, the art gems of the world. We passed Manets, Monets, and Pissarros, Renoirs, Degas, and Cezannes. Morisot’s In the Cornfield at Gennevilliers caught my eye. Its pale golden wheat field seemed to soothe that forlorn feeling that had crept inside my breast. The lone figure in the blue shirt and straw hat, standing on the worn path, sounded an even deeper emotion, too subliminal to define. Yet it stirred a sense of holistic otherness, of being swept up imperceptibly into that larger world of unbroken green trees and white and gray houses with red rooftops that Morisot had created as a border. Here was an immersion into beingness itself that silenced any need for conscious explanations.
“I once had sex with a girl in a wheat field,” I said in a whisper.
“Was it that beautiful woman you mentioned earlier?”
“No. She came later. It was with an Israeli girl, on a kibbutz, near Haifa. We had been working together in the kibbutz’s citrus groves. We roomed in the same barracks. She and a roommate were at one end of the hall, and I and another guy roomed at the other end. After dinner one evening, we walked out into a nearby field. The stars were especially bright, and the night air was clear. It was in April, or maybe May. Her parents were from London, but had come to the kibbutz in the late forties to become part of the Jewish state. She was about seventeen and soon due to fulfill her military obligation. She wasn’t religious, just an ethnic Jew, a true Israeli, a sabra, as she called herself. We lay down in the field together. I had never had sex until then. We undressed each other amidst a flurry of kisses. We had dust all over ourselves when we finished. We laughed and ran back to the barracks and showered together. We met like that for a whole month, until she had to leave for the army. I left soon afterwards, myself. I never saw her again. Nor heard from her, nor wrote her. She had short, honey-colored hair, which, of course, was dyed.”
“Carl and I had our first sex behind a smokehouse. He had come out of the big house to fetch a side of bacon. I guess I was fourteen. I ran along side of him. He was wearing overalls, a white shirt, and brogans. It was his last summer on the farm before returning to Harvard to defend his dissertation. I was barefooted, wearing a flour sack dress Mama had stitched for me. It was gray with pink flowers. We still had a mill in Alabama, not far from the farm. Its wheel is broken, now, and its wooden sluices split and spilling water, but it was quite a mill in its time. I’d been on the steps of the mill once when Carl looked up and saw my behind. I didn’t have any pants on. He smiled and kept staring, until I moved. But that day at the smokehouse, I teased him: ‘Where you headed, big man?’ Then I ran ahead of him and got on the plank steps. God, he was tall, lean, good-looking. Sweat was coursing down his neck and soiling his white shirt. I barred his way to the door. ‘Julene!’ he said. ‘You’re too pretty to be acting sassy like this. You know I got hormones, just like my uncle had for your mama.’ ‘I ain’t hiding nothin’,’ I replied. I put my hands on his arms and ran my fingers up to his shoulders. ‘Dammit, girl. I got a notion to do it right here,’ he smiled. I glanced toward the rear of the building. And, Lord, Clayton, we did it! I mean we did it, right there up against
