Viewing page 30 of 100

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

FREEDOMWAYS                  THIRD QUARTER 1973

yet been invented. The foreign news section dozed in the same post-war atmosphere which led most otherwise mentally capable world leaders to conclude that the "natives" of the world had forgotten the promises of freedom made in the heat of battle. This serenity, which is the bogeyman in the lives of advertising and circulation vice presidents, presented the Paris correspondent with a chance to do his thing. Result: The Black Expatriate.

It wasn't that the piece was offensive, or at least no more so than the usual Anglo-Saxon, myopic view of things which aren't well bred enough to go out and drop dead. But it definitely exuded the unmistakable bouquet of Establishment disdain despite its well-educated admission that Paris had always lured expatriates. There were even American expatriates like Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Henry MIller. But the real message was that any brother who hinted, by taking off, that God's country could contain anything unpalatable was messing around with subversion, if not outright treason!

Eventually the number containing the article found its way to Monaco, where Dick Wright read it to the gleefully agitated crowd with more than his usual gusto, punctuating each lamentably ill-informed fact with, "Keeee-ryess, now ain't thatabitch?" Chicago George spasmodically stamping both feet and giggling, fell out. "Expatriate," he shrieked. "Sheeeeee-ittt, them mothahs ain't even 'lowed me to be a patriot so hownafugg I'm gon' git to be a EX-patriot?"

Some afternoons when I'd finished work I'd stroll over to Monparnasse hoping to find Harris. Brother Harris was unadulterated "country," from praying on his knees every night before hopping into the sack, to making clicking noises when the cussing got to be too colorful for his AME Sunday school background. Harris had never even been to the town next to his in Mississippi when the long arm of the U.S. Army, Mess Section, reached in and plucked him out. Harris had cooked powdered eggs and dehydrated spuds from El Alamein to Anzio, where a red-neck from the 82nd Airborne, perhaps believing that Black brothers deserved Purple Hearts more than most folks, shot Harris in his right buttock. When the war ended Harris had convinced himself that it was God who'd plucked him out of good ole Mississippi and so damned if he wasn't going to show God his appreciation by staying out! Harris also had a theory. "I never seen no diff'ence 'tween them SS and these airborne." Harris explained in his gentle voice. "They even looks alike an' I have seen 'em

204