“How does it feel to be a white man?” William Gardner Smith’s “The Stone Face”

Working on my syllabus for my upcoming “Black Expatriate Writers in France” class, I came across William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face (1963), and even though the course focuses on Southern France (Marseille and Nice), I decided to include Smith’s novel, which is set in Paris, because of its depiction of French colonial racism against Algerians and itd depiction of the Paris Massacre of 1961. Along with this, I chose to include The Stone Face because the novel explores the tensions that authors such as James Baldwin, Smith, and others experienced as they headed to France to escape racism and oppression in the United States and their feelings of guilt, at times, of being in France during the Movement itself in the 1960s. Along with these tensions, the novel also addresses, through the Algerian nationalists that Simeon Brown befriends, the far-reaching tendrils of racism across the globe.

Two epigraphs precede the narrative of the novel, and both epigraphs come from the Bible. Exodus 2:22, “I have been a stranger in a strange land,” refers to the birth of Gershom, Moses’ son. In the novel, this epigraph relates to Simeon, and we can read it either as a reference to his experiences in the United States where he is the victim of physical and psychological racist attacks or in reference to his time in France as a…