James Baldwin’s autobiographical reflections can be read like short stories where the author is both the central figure and the observer of life. “Equal in Paris” is part of a collection of ten essays that Baldwin published in 1955 under the title Notes of a Native Son. Footnote ¹ These essays reflect in varying ways Baldwin’s personal views on being Black and American in both America and abroad; the collection became a classic of the autobiographical genre.

The events in “Equal in Paris” are set in the context of his first visit to France in 1948, the country that eventually became his second home. Baldwin describes his arrival in Paris and a series of encounters that led to an eight-day incarceration in a Parisian prison in December 1949, when he faced charges of receiving stolen goods, in this case, a hotel bedsheet. Baldwin is arrested, interrogated, fingerprinted, and jailed some twelve kilometers outside of Paris. When he is eventually tried, his case evokes laughter from the courtroom, and the judge dismisses the charges against him completely. While this is a story about how an African American man experiences the frustrating, even cruel bureaucracy of the justice system in France, it is also a candidly written tale about the writer’s personal vulnerabilities in his search for a new life.

By 1949, Baldwin had been living in Paris for a year in a “ludicrously grim hotel” (101). He lived and worked in the heart of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a district which, during the late 1940s and early 1950s, was the center of a thriving artistic and literary community and a place “where nightclubs and bars of varying reputations flourished, allowing Baldwin to openly explore both his literary craft and his sexuality.”Footnote ² Having arrived in Paris with only $40 on him and unable to speak French, Baldwin spent much of his time writing in cafés and meeting with fellow American expatriates. Early on in the essay, in an amusing yet depressing observation, Baldwin explains why cafés were so important in France: “The moment I began living in French hotels, I understood the necessity of French cafés” (101). Those who have visited certain districts in Paris will recognize many of the details of Baldwin’s descriptions, especially of fading grandeur, a façade of gentility that can mask decaying structures and institutions. The hotel where he stays is run by an elderly gentleman who “had really stopped breathing around 1910,” and who, “[i]t was said,” had not gone outside for thirty years: “He looked as though the daylight would have killed him” (101).

Most current readers might know Baldwin as the Black writer and intellectual born in Harlem, New York, but he was also a twenty-four-year-old gay man when he arrived in France as an immigrant. Immigrant here does not refer to someone who has been forced to migrate, but France was a refuge of sorts, his move a search for a new life. This was his first stay abroad, an escape from the social and racial injustices of life in the United States, an escape that he believed literally saved his life and made it possible for him to write. He understood that he needed to flee from the United States because he understood how powerful hatred could be. These feelings did not emerge in a social and political vacuum; they were part of the daily hostility and contempt felt by many African Americans who were regularly denied access to public places, denied service in cafés and restaurants, and generally made to feel that they did not belong. It is not surprising to learn that feelings of resentment and anger grew to the point where one night in New Jersey, when yet another waitress said to him, “we don’t serve Negroes here,” Baldwin snapped and hurled a mug half full of water at her across the room. The jug missed and shattered on the floor, and at that moment, Baldwin writes, “with that sound, my frozen blood abruptly thawed.” As he ran to safety, he realized that not only could he have been murdered, but more disturbingly for him, that “I could have been ready to commit murder … my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.”Footnote ³ Toward the end of the essay in which he recounts this experience, Baldwin reflects on his father’s words, that what was important was “to hold onto the things that mattered.” For Baldwin, this did not mean accepting injustice as commonplace. The struggle had to continue but he had to keep his heart “free of hatred and despair.”Footnote ⁴

The expatriate experience in Paris therefore saved Baldwin from self-destruction and allowed for new experiences in the quest to find his identity in a new land. In his analysis of the two-way migration between Europe and the United States, the historian Lloyd Kramer explains the significance of the movement of creative, literary, and artistic people to the United States who wished to escape fascist, racist, or communist regimes in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. They sought refuge in the self-identified freedom of US society. But Kramer writes that this focus on migration to the United States “made it difficult for analysts of exile migrations to see the movement of creative artists and intellectuals who chose to leave America after World War II because they felt deprived of freedom, equality or opportunities for a literary career.”Footnote ⁵ This expatriation included a significant number of African-American writers, musicians, and artists who lived in Paris during the early decades of the Cold War, “when France seemed to offer an attractive alternative to racial barriers and exclusions in the United States.”Footnote ⁶ While the groups migrating into and also out of the United States meant new audiences and new opportunities for writers and artists, it also gave them experience of what it was to live as an alien, a migrant, or an expatriate, all terms which imply a leaving and searching for new horizons.

In his 2014 New York Times article, the writer Ellery Washington recounts retracing Baldwin’s steps in Paris, frequenting the cafés and clubs where Baldwin ate, drank, and socialized. Washington writes that in spring 1984, “during an interview for The Paris Review, a nearly 60-year-old Baldwin was asked why he had chosen to live in France, to which he replied: ‘It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France—it was a matter of getting out of America.’”Footnote ⁷ For Baldwin, France, not the United States, was the place where an intellectual like him could be free because in France, he would not be noticed. Washington explains his fascination with Baldwin, “the fact that he, a gay black man had written so boldly and lived so openly at a time when there was such deep social hatred and opposition aimed at those of us who shared either Baldwin’s race or sexual identity, let alone both. What’s more, the fact that he had found a way to live and write freely in Paris made the city feel like an essential destination for me.”Footnote ⁸

Baldwin’s experience of being an American in Paris allows him to write with the acute consciousness of a stranger who can reveal the internal contradictions of French life and culture. Culture, however, remains a contested notion, embodying different meanings that range from culture as a way of life, a definition that relies largely on manifest markers, rituals, values, and behaviors, to culture viewed largely as artistic activity. These approaches to culture rely on that which is visible in society. But culture is also what is hidden, quietly residing in institutions and symbols, a certain style of language and manners. It is what stays unseen and unspoken and keeps outsiders feeling like outsiders. It is in this sense that Baldwin is an outsider to French culture. Unable to speak the language, he is more aware of his racial and national heritage as a US citizen. Baldwin sees the French as an “intelligent” and “cultured” race, but their manners are unfamiliar (102). People may recognize gestures and expressions, but communication is generally culturally specific. And when jailed and brought to court on the charge of theft, he also acknowledges that one pays a heavy price for culture that lies in people’s personalities and institutions. While the concept of “institutions” has a ring of safety around it, it was not until one comes into contact with them that you understand how “outmoded, exasperating, completely impersonal and very often cruel” (102) they can be. Although authorities everywhere can exercise control and coercion, as an outsider, one often remains unaware of the different “techniques their cruelty [can take]” (105–06).

Baldwin was a writer, a traveler, and a migrant in Paris and in Europe more generally. It is reasonable to contend that all migrants are looking for some kind of escape or refuge, whether physical or intellectual, but leaving one’s home country always comes with personal challenges and costs. People travel far and arrive in a new country with no proper idea of what it means to be physically and psychologically dislocated, and their daily experiences can bring hope and distress in equal measure. The diaspora experience is not necessarily a shared intellectual experience, but for a writer like Baldwin, “from the vantage point of Europe, he [the American] discovers his own country.”Footnote ⁹

Baldwin’s desire to write out of his own experience means that racism remains a central issue in his works whether he is in France or the United States. For him, the right to criticize a place—in this case, the United States—is a right born of both intense rage and love for his country: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”Footnote ¹⁰ This sentiment has been echoed by many African American scholars and public intellectuals. Cornel West, often hailed as a leading authority on issues of race and democracy, writes, “My efforts to understand myself are inseparable from understanding what it means to be human, modern, American, black, male and straight in global and local contexts.”Footnote ¹¹ West’s ideals are developed in dialogue with American values and directed specifically at urging American citizens to reimagine a more complete humanity in the remaking of America.Footnote ¹² As a Christian, West also critiques the historical direction of his faith and says that “modern Christianity is thoroughly shot through with white supremacy like every other institution in modernity.”Footnote ¹³ In his analysis of the close relationship between the political and the spiritual in Baldwin’s writings, Michael F. Lynch writes, “While on the one hand many African Americans have found solace and inspiration in Christian ideals and spirituality, they also have been scandalized by many acts of inhumanity committed by professed Christians.”Footnote ¹⁴ Baldwin, too, represents this tension. At the age of seventeen, Baldwin abandoned his role as a preacher in a Harlem fundamentalist church, but, as Lynch writes, “his investment in Christian ideals and themes did not end.” Rather, Lynch contends, “Although Baldwin bitterly attacks Christianity over the course of his career for what he sees as its condoning of racism and injustice toward African Americans, he develops a theology based on Christian ideals and on his individual quest for a loving God.”Footnote ¹⁵ In migrating to another country, people are often compelled to negotiate their relationship with the place where they choose to live, to evaluate their emotional and cultural hybridity. Our identities as citizens are always in conversation with the language, cultures, and people around us and how they make us feel. But it is not necessary to migrate to feel an outsider. If the cultural and material memory of your own nation does not contain your history, then a sense of belonging becomes even more challenging. Yet there is no other heritage one can use. Recognizing himself to be a kind of “bastard of the West,” Baldwin does not find himself in Europe but in Africa. Thus, he writes: “And this meant that in some subtle way, in a really profound way, I brought to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral at Chartres, and to the Empire State Building, a special attitude. These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history… . I was an interloper; this was not my heritage.”Footnote ¹⁶

While Baldwin’s personal story can encapsulate much of the African American experience, each story of migration and human diaspora is unique. Today, in Europe and in the West generally, migration tends to be discussed in statistics rather than in human terms. Concerns about migration do not always bring up issues of race and color, but being a person of color in nations premised on predominantly white cultures, means that the non-white citizen can never really be complacent about society’s attitude or expectations. Despite Europe being home to millions of non-white citizens, the sense of belonging is never settled. In political terms, the nationalist perspective argues belonging can only happen when there is a common history, common cultural roots, and even common religious beliefs among a people. The expression of faith in private and in public can be problematic to perceptions of cultural homogeneity and unity. It is no exaggeration to say that in recent years, the visibility of minority religions, especially Islam, in relatively secularized Western countries, has created a new level of toxicity to identity politics.

Migration has become politically charged with a growing sense that citizenship and multiculturalism are not simply matters of cultural integration, of legal rights and obligations, but also a public issue and, a test of faithfulness to society. More recently, the political focus on refugees and asylum seekers from North Africa and the Middle East, has created a divisive and even fearful environment in which those fleeing to a new country are often met in a climate of fear rather than hospitality. As a result, many migrants find it difficult to nurture a sense of belonging and faithfulness to the host country even though they want to feel accepted.

Faithfulness requires endurance for it is about the preservation of bonds and depends on a mutuality of right relationships. It is in the web of human interaction, of social relations through which one can elevate feelings of cohesion and hope in the civic space, especially for those arriving into a new country. When we replace the language of resentment with the language of mutual recognition and gratitude, we allow for greater empathy and sociability in our fractured relationships.

Thus, our moral visions for life are most compelling when they say something about how all of us relate to one another as citizens, neighbors, and friends in the spaces we share. All moral life is relational and its struggles require that we open ourselves to others and cultivate virtuous relationships. Despite the renewed interest in migration and the complexity of urban societies today, there is no alternative to coexistence.

The subtext for moral sources is using one’s imaginations to bring all aspects of life into an intricate whole, thereby showing the strength and complexity of human interconnectedness. For educationalists like the American Irving Babbit, the true purpose of education is to assimilate the wisdom of the ages through the right use of the human imagination: art is essential to creating community. As commentator Glenn Davis writes about Babbit’s theory of education, “What creates community—what advances civilization and the happiness of the human person—is that which takes the individual away from his impulsive, natural, self-conceit and offers a larger reality revealed through the lessons of the ages. These lessons, exemplified in great works of literature and history, communicate the larger world and stimulate the moral imagination of the student with reference to a shared, humane center.”Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, the higher purpose of all education is the expansion of one’s emotional and intellectual horizons.

While migration to Paris could be seen as imperative to Baldwin’s survival, his travels compelled him to explore the accompanying questions of belonging and identity. Paris and Europe more generally became the places where he could think more deeply about himself and the country he loved and kept leaving, the United States. He realized that the real struggle of travel and migration does not lie in concerns around employment or citizenship, important as they are, but what a person discovers about themselves in the process. Writing is largely a solitary experience, allowing the writer to dwell on their interior life. In Baldwin’s case, the escape to Europe is inextricably tied to a search for intellectual and emotional freedom that Baldwin, as a Black American, finds lacking in the United States. He writes that the reason why the American writer “keeps running off to Europe” is that “[h]e needs sustenance for his journey and the best models he can find. Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a new sense of life’s possibilities.”Footnote ¹⁸ This search for an intellectual home in which white and Black Americans can reassess their lives while remaining psychologically unsettled pervades his reflections on his time in Europe.

The meaning of home appears frequently in Baldwin’s writings but is best described in Giovanni’s Room, where Baldwin writes of home as “perhaps … not a place but simply an irrecoverable condition.”Footnote ¹⁹ For Baldwin, the differences between home and place suggest that neither is really about geographical space. Home remains a paradoxical concept and feeling. It does not necessarily rely on the quest for rootedness but rather on friendships, community, and all those relationships with people and institutions that form part of our daily lives. For many, wherever one lives, it can be the struggle of a lifetime to settle, to make friends, and to be accepted for who you are—or desire to become—personally and professionally.

Baldwin narrates the events of “Equal in Paris” with a sharp and unsettling discernment about his experience of a different culture in a city that became his second physical and intellectual home. While Baldwin is a stranger in Europe, he also belongs in Europe in a way that he did not belong in the United States. For Baldwin, both worlds assumed a contradictory sense of home and exile at the same time. Exile, too, can be a state of mind, an experience that can happen anywhere and one that is not limited to geography. But physical exile, the voluntary crossing of borders, occupying a different cultural space, can create new inspiration for any artist. Even with modest means, one can observe and live life in new ways. Baldwin might have felt he did not truly belong anywhere, even though alienation in Paris felt different from alienation in the United States. In Paris, he was still a Black American and faced the prejudices that many Black people do in predominantly white societies. But he also cultivated and inspired a new sense of community and forged new friendships. Paris has a sophistication and an indifference that is beguiling, and perhaps for Baldwin, this is what made it easier to cultivate a personal sense of home.

In many of his works, Baldwin’s fundamental lament is the insanity of the state of affairs whereby the white US citizen is unable to find a way of coexisting with Black US citizens. And yet he never relinquished his US passport because in all his travels, he carried America within him. He is a victim of racism but as a writer, he is also conscious of his moral duty to his audience. In spite of the prevalence and dehumanizing effects of racial prejudice, the job of the writer is to give us a sense of new possibilities, new justices as captured in the lines of the British Nigerian poet and novelist, Ben Okri who wrote “There’s always a new way, a better way that’s not been tried before.”Footnote ²⁰ Artists cannot simply linger on the pain of the past and present because they must also point to a more hopeful future. Baldwin’s works reveal the struggle of a novelist whose anger and anguish became a prophetic voice, and whose search for belonging and justice never obscured the gratitude he felt for the gift of writing.