PARIS HERE I COME!

In the footsteps of my Uncle Ollie

- DODAI STEWART

My favourite Paris guidebook is not from Lonely Planet, Wallpaper or Monocle. In fact, I’m sure you have never heard of it. Titled Paris Here I Come! and published by the Afro-American Co in 1953, it is a slim volume, a mere 30 pages set inside a cheerful yellow cover emblazoned with a white line drawing of the Eiffel Tower.

Full of charming, conversational advice, the booklet describes Paris as “not a place, but a way of living — unique, lusty and uninhibited”.

The book’s author, Ollie Stewart, was my father’s uncle, born in Louisiana in 1906. He was the first black reporter accredited as a war correspondent during World War II, and after the war, he lived in Paris until his death in 1977.

In the e-book Race Goes To War, Antero Pietila and Stacy Spaulding describe Uncle Ollie’s wartime travels for The Afro-American, a black newspaper based in Baltimore. He covered skirmishes in North Africa in 1942, the battle for Sicily in 1943 and the invasion of Normandy in 1944.

He described conditions of segregated soldiers, attended trainings of the Tuskegee Airmen, and was “treated as a celebrity in The Afro and other black newspapers”.

After the war, instead of returning home to the Jim Crow South, he stayed in Paris, where I met him for the first and only time in 1976. I was a small child, travelling with my parents, and I remember just fragments of visiting Uncle Ollie’s tiny apartment — his cigarette smoke, his piles of books and papers, his hulking black typewriter, his wrinkled grin.

Uncle Ollie died the next year. He never married and had no children. But his writing about Paris reveals how he fell in love with the city. In addition to Paris Here I Come! he wrote lots of unpublished Paris-oriented articles and essays, including a 4,000-word piece titled Café Sitting: A Way Of Life.

So when I am in Paris, as I was last year to cover the Olympics, I seek out Uncle Ollie’s words.