The New Internationals

Cecile walked at a clip from the metro at Place de la République, late for her rendezvous. It was autumn, 1947. The day had been wet and cold, and she removed her raincoat and the scarf from her head, entering the Cirque d’Hiver. The choice of location for the show still confounded her. A diminutive, replica Colosseum, with an archly baroque interior and glass-domed ceiling, the Cirque was meant for trapeze acts and clowns and lion tamers, not for men of the stature of Louis Armstrong.

The pulse of anticipation beat floor to ceiling, the steeped-banked tiers of seats nearly full and still filling, mostly with dark faces—mostly GIs by the look of it. Cecile was one of only a spattering of whites, those others, like her, apparently French. She scanned the room for some sign of Minette’s coffee-and-cream colored face, praying that her friend hadn’t changed her mind.

They’d met at a Communist Party Youth Conference the summer after the war and become very close, but Minette had gone cold when Cecile told her about taking a job as a typist at the American military base at Orly, outside the city. “So you’ve changed sides, then?” she’d said in a J’accuse tone.

“Mais, non! Be serious. It’s just a job,” Cecile had retorted. “You live with your parents. Me, I need work. Theirs pay like ours cannot.”

They’d hardly spoken since.

Cecile hadn’t told Minette about Mack, the GI she’d begun dating after taking the job—nearly three months now—and who had bought the tickets for the show. His charm would win Minette over, Cecile felt certain of this. And besides, the American blacks weren’t really American: what Cecile heard them describe of their struggles in the States mirrored the things Minette suffered here.

Cecile didn’t see Mack either. Most of the GIs present wore dress uniforms, trim and proper, though some were in long-tailed zoot suits, with flared trousers and broad hats, buzzing and cackling and stomping their feet, and this seemed fitting, too.

An usher approached. Rivulets of broken blood vessels ranged over his yellowed cheeks. “You picked the wrong night to come to the show, Mademoiselle,” he said, voice raised over the din, a hand outstretched for her ticket.

“Pardon?”

“It’s jungle night tonight.” He smiled conspiratorially. “The Americans won’t let their white and black soldiers mix. So, we get the monkeys all at once.”

She snatched the ticket stub from his hand.

Turning, she paused to fully take in the stage—an upright piano, a drum kit, and a double bass propped on a stand, its wooden face glistening. Above, a banner stretched from one end to the other—“Bienvenu au Roi Nègre du Jazz, Louis Armstrong!”—and beside the words, a round caricature of Armstrong’s face, with big white eyes and bulbous red lips.

The rest of her countrymen, it seemed, were hardly better than this usher, even when trying to be.

The usher lurked beside Cecile. “But of course,” he said, casting a sidelong glance at her Star of David pendant before wearily moving on. “I’d forgotten the affinity that your people share with theirs.”

“Sale con!” she called after him.

It was men like him who had betrayed them to the Nazis.

At the top of the grandstand, she spotted Seb, seated beside his sister Jacqueline and Boubacar. There was no mistaking them in that crowd, straight-backed and not interacting with each other, much less anyone else, each of their dark faces facing fixedly down at the stage though nothing was happening there yet.

What terrible luck.

Running into him in the streets of the Quatier latin, sure. They shared the neighborhood and its favored haunts. But at this jazz concert, when she was with Mack?

If Seb hadn’t already, he might notice her during the show. She headed up the stiff stairs to avoid any awkwardness later.

Boubacar rose to kiss cheeks, warm and welcoming. “How long has it been?” He answered his own question: “Too long!”

Jacqueline offered her hand, then Seb joined Cecile in the aisle and they kissed, cheek to cheek to cheek.

“Maman still asks after you,” Cecile said, unsure why she’d begun with this.

“I very much liked her, too,” he replied, his face open, his smile tight but true. “She’s quite something.”

“And Beaux-Arts?” Cecile asked. “Did you make the cut?”

The abruptness of this question was no more tactful, especially if the news was bad. But she’d spent hours and hours helping him prepare for the entrance exam. They’d broken up before he received the results, and she’d wondered nonstop since.

“They don’t seem pressed to seat the class,” he said.

“You haven’t heard anything!”

“Not a word,” he said, his smile forced now, mournful.

With the endless succession of strikes and work shutdowns, the postal carriers had only sporadically delivered the mail for weeks. Maybe this was the cause of the delay.

He changed the subject. “We’re here representing the ASUFC.” Their protest organization: the African Students’ Union of Francophone Colonies. “We’ve got a meeting with Armstrong after the show. We’re going to try to establish a connection.”

Boubacar, who’d clearly been eavesdropping, leaned toward them. “For all that the French disdain us, they absolutely adore the black Americans. The jazzman would be a great ally to have.”

Seb jumped in: “Are you here on your own? Do you want to join us?”

“I’d love to,” said Cecile, “but I can’t. I’m with friends.”

Seb made a show of scanning the crowd, then his gaze settled on a spot in the first row. Cecile, following it, saw Mack.

“Is that the—” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. She’d first met Mack during a night out dancing with Seb at Le Tabou Club, when they were still dating.

Mack and his friends were in uniform and not zoot suits—formal: olive drab jackets, cinched at the waist by brown leather belts; khaki shirts and ties; braided white fourragères strung through their left epaulettes. This relieved Cecile. She realized that she cared how Seb perceived Mack.

Seeing Seb’s face close on itself, she also realized that she liked seeing him jealous.

The houselights flickered off then on, off then on. The show would begin soon.

“I’d better go,” she said.

Seb leaned toward her and they kissed cheeks—stiffly this time, coolly.

Cecile said to the others, “Enjoy the evening. Au revoir.”

The other two turned toward her, their smiles distant now, even Boubacar.

She worked her way down the steep stairs.

As she neared, Mack flicked a Lucky Strike up through the tear in the top of his pack and extended it toward her.

“Merci,” she said.

But when he leaned over to kiss her, it was all she could do to not turn away, to offer a cheek, knowing that Seb would be watching.

She stretched upward instead, kissing him fully on the mouth.

She called “Hello!” to his friends and their dates. Most nodded or waved, though Tony Smith, Cecile’s favorite, crossed to her and kissed cheeks, à la française.

“I am very sorry,” she told Mack, “but I think that my friend has desisted at the last minute.”

“Desisted?”

She knew her English to be strong, but when she was with Mack and his group, never as much so as at work, with the white Americans.

“Minette,” she explained. “How to say, um… She cannot come, apparently.”

“Ain’t no thing,” he said, unconcerned in a way she would not be, had it been her who’d spent all that money on the ticket.

The lights dimmed and the crowd stilled. A spotlight clicked on, throwing a circle of unnatural white onto a standing microphone in the middle of the stage, just in front of the drum kit. Into the circle strode a man in black tails.

Mack bent close to Cecile’s ear. “That your ex up there?” She understood that he was referring to Seb and not the man on stage. “You still see him?”

“I do not, no,” said Cecile. “But we are not not friends, if that is what you are asking.”

Mack faced her, and she worked hard to match his gaze, as she had nothing to hide.

On stage, the man started in French—“Messieurs-dames, chèrs amis”—then he shifted to a thickly accented English: “Tonight, we gather ourselves to welcome a most honored guest…” He Americanized the pronunciation of the first name—“Louisse”—and the second sounded like two words—“Arm Strong!”—the arch cadences of French misshaping his speech.

She wondered if she sounded as affected when she spoke.

The crowd surged, rising and applauding.

“Africa has rarely produced such a tropical gem. Genius can originate from any color, beauty found in any race. To hear his boomlay-boomlay-boom is to know the bright-colored enjoyment of life!”

Cecile liked that the emcee had connected the American jazzman to his African roots, even if clumsily. But “boomlay-boomlay-boom?” Did this man know that Armstrong played a trumpet and not some tribal drum?

She turned toward Mack, who stared back, his bemusement reflecting her own.

A strange, uneasy hush engulfed the Cirque, here and there a guffaw. Somebody flung the crumpled wad of a paper program at the emcee, and booing and derisive whistling suddenly filled the space. Tony Smith began calling: “Satchmo! Satchmo!” and others followed suit.

Theemceehunghishead, and Cecilenoticedtherottenold usher beside the exit, smiling derisively, so obviously pleased to see confirmed his narrow beliefs about unruly and uncontrollable blacks.

“Satchmo! Satchmo! Satchmo!”

Louis Armstrong appeared beside the stage, in a burgundy tuxedo and black bow tie, his horn in one hand. He walked unhurriedly out and placed his free arm over the drooped shoulders of the emcee. The man didn’t raise his face.

“Let’s just simmer down,” Armstrong said into the microphone, the raw timpani of his voice booming throughout the auditorium, silencing the deafening burst of applause.

Cecile stopped clapping, too—as did Mack, looking bewitched, awed by this strange spectacle.

Armstrong led the emcee from beneath the spot as his band took their places, the stage lights coming up. The other jazzmen wore black tuxedoes opposite Armstrong’s flashier style, and two of them were white, the double bass player and another, holding a clarinet.

“When I was a boy,” Armstrong said, center stage again, standing beneath the awful caricature of his own face, “in an orphanage, making chump change as best I could working in barrooms and whatnot, it was a man something like that man there what saved me.”

His voice seemed more like graceful movement than sound. But what a sound! The gravel and tar, like Seb’s. Cecile, the entire crowd, listened, rapt.

“His name was Karnofsky.” Armstrong reached two fingers into the crease of his shirt, below the bow tie, and removed a pendant of some sort for them to see, though it was too small for Cecile to make out, even at that short distance. “A Jewish man, like that one there.” And she understood it to be a Star of David, wondering how closely it matched her own. “I wasn’t but seven, but Mister Karnofsky gave me odds-and-ends jobs, hauling junk and suchlike, and he and his wife treated me like family and taught me things I needed to know that I weren’t no ways learning in Storyville. Real life things.”

A spattering of cheers. Here and there, clapping.

“So, let’s not jump on a man for only knowing what he knows. Let’s not be so petty.”

The cheering crescendoed, the applause electric.

“Let’s recognize rightness when we see it, even if it ain’t perfect.”

It struck Cecile: the jazzman and his troupe were like she and Mack were now, like she and Seb had been before, black with white, her a Jew. This mixed band, like her and her men, was the world as it should be—not blood traitors, like Vichy and their seed who’d survived the purges claimed, not self-haters, but beautiful and new.

“And last but not least…” Armstrong smiled for the first time, his mouth seeming as broad as the one on the odious banner above, as bright as the hot spotlight. “Ladies and gents, let’s have us a rollicking good roll!”

The band began all at once—the trombone and the clarinet and the double bass, the drummer drumming. Only Armstrong did not play. He stood, head bowed, tapping one foot and snapping the fingers of his free hand.

GIs danced in the aisles, men in zoot suits, their whirling coattails making colorful strokes. Mack pulled Cecile to him then pushed her off, still holding on, then he twirled her. Tony Smith swung his date, Mack’s other friends twisting and whirling, their arms in the air. Cecile peeped up the grandstand, though she knew she wouldn’t be able to see Seb. She twirled with Mack, twirled and held on.