Youthful Quest for Muse in City of Light

It is 1986 and 26-year-old Eden Daniels, the protagonist in Shay Youngblood’s second novel, desperately wants to be a writer. First scribbling thoughts between the lines of books her father brings home from his custodian’s job, then reading James Baldwin after hours on her job tending the musty Georgia mansion of a long-dead entrepreneur, Eden yearns for the freedom to write, which she believes can only be found abroad.

She imagines herself part of a long line of writers and other artists, “James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera, [who] had all lived in Paris as if it had been part of their training for greatness.” Eden feels a particular affinity for Baldwin, whose story of doomed homosexual love in “Giovanni’s Room” gives her the courage to “kiss any lips my heart desires.”

And if Baldwin found freedom and inspiration in Paris, then Eden will follow in his footsteps, just as painters set up easels in the Louvre to copy and learn the secrets of the masters.

“Black Girl in Paris” chronicles Eden’s quest--for a glimpse of her idol Baldwin, for artistic freedom, for experience with a capital E. Organized into chapters that announce her various underclass jobs (artist’s model, au pair, thief, etc.), the novel shifts from one adventure to another as the Southern girl trades the terror of her early years in Birmingham (grimly called Bombingham after the infamous 1963 murder of four little black girls in a church) for the terror of the bombings ripping Paris apart.

To find her bearings in Paris’ winding and increasingly dangerous streets, Eden makes verbal and spatial maps of safe routes through the city and numerous lists on how one should live. Lovers of Paris will find the African American presence Eden references there fascinating while the recipes for pommes tarte tartin (apple tart) and gratin dauphinois (scalloped potatoes) are a seemingly unexpected bonus unless one is familiar with Youngblood’s first novel, “Soul Kiss,” which included a recipe for red velvet cake.

More important, however, Eden’s recipes, maps and lists, like her early musings in the margins of books back home, mark the evolution of her creative expression, her search for a unique love and language. “And since one didn’t exist,” she says, “I’d have to invent one following the trails and signs left by other travelers.”

Yet for all of her seemingly picaresque adventures, her narrow escapes from homelessness, perversion or worse, Eden is largely an innocent abroad, Dorothy as portrayed in the film “The Wizard of Oz,” looking for a wizard to make it all better. And Baldwin is that magical being, the traveler with whom Eden is most obsessed, the man who can cast a spell that will somehow, voila! make her a writer.

But as she gains experience, makes her lists and stays attentive to her surroundings, the reader sees the writer inside Eden emerge and blossom, even as her circumstances become increasingly more precarious. By the time she travels to St.-Paul-de-Vence in a last-ditch effort to meet her idol, Eden has a revelation not unlike Dorothy’s that finally convinces her she has the wherewithal to try her creative wings.

In “Black Girl in Paris,” Youngblood is also trying her creative wings, which has resulted in a novel that, in its eroticism, shifting sexuality and vivid imagery, bears more than a little resemblance to “Soul Kiss.” Yet “Black Girl” in some ways is more daring, eschewing the comfortable imagery of the strong black women who nurtured the protagonist of the earlier novel for the more complex and unpredictable set of guides who propel Eden’s development.

At one point in the novel, Eden declares, “Here in another country I am new, I choose what and who I would be. A writer. A person who survives a dangerous life, and risks to tell about it.” It’s an apt description of both protagonist and author Youngblood, whose calculated risk pays off in an engaging, unpredictable portrait of an artist as a young black girl.