.” Sometimes this hobby overlapped with our family trips. Our vacation videos, which might begin with a shot of me as a toddler riding a carousel, would invariably cut to a half-hour-long conversation with a young man from Martinique who had made the innocent mistake of disembarking from his motorcycle in front of my father.
was part of the cast. Truman Capote wrote about the Everyman Opera after traveling with them to St. Petersburg in a 1956 piece for.” Thomas told my father he was annoyed at Capote for largely ignoring the Black cast, and for crafting, instead, an entertaining travelogue about the wardrobe and the chitchat of the wealthy, white wives—Leonore Gershwin and Wilva Breen—who had come along.
In my father’s recording of Thomas, he asks how Thomas feels about leaving the struggle of Black life in the United States. Thomas is remorseful. He recalls the stories he heard as a child, from elders who fought in World War I, and wonders who will pass these tales on to his many nieces and nephews. At the same time, he recalls the limitations that sent him searching for freedom abroad. He explains that a white man, down on his luck in skid row, can put on a suit and get whatever life he wants.
In the mid-’90s, on a different trip, my father took me with him on a visit to the home of the writer and sculptor. I recall a parkside apartment imbued with elegance, bringing to mind the impossibly fashionable Black American singer in the filmwho strolls through Luxembourg Gardens during the blue hour of twilight with a gold umbrella in the rain. Chase-Riboud was born in Philadelphia in 1939. The Museum of Modern Art acquired a woodcut of hers when she was 15 years old.
Another artist who my father visited frequently while abroad in the ’80s and ’90s was the abstract painter Ed Clark, who was born inand moved to Paris in the 1950s. In a video online, Clark describes how the Hungarian landlord of his Paris studio cut a skylight into the roof when he wished, aloud, for light. “Suddenly,” he says, “I had light.” While in Paris, Clark