“We’re not racist!”: France in William Gardner Smith’s “The Stone Face”

Recently, I’ve been looking at “whiteness” in William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face. Today, I want to continue that discussion by looking further at Simeon’s interactions with Ahmed and Hossein, specifically on going to Hossein’s apartment in Paris. While Simeon, earlier in the novel, recognizes, through his “double perspective,” the atrocities that the French enact upon the Algerians, the movement through the, as Simeon dubs it, the “Harlem of Paris” solidifies the connections between the racism Simeon encountered in the United States and the racism and xenophobia that Ahmed, Hossein, and others encounter in France.

Simeon and Ahmed ride the bus to Hossein’s apartment, and the narrator makes it clear that the movement through Paris represents the movement through New York to Harlem. The bus is described as moving “[n]orthward toward the Harlem,” and the opening sentence of the section chronicles Simeon’s thoughts, “Orpheus descending into Harlem.” Driving north, Simeon looks out of the window and sees scenes that remind him of Harlem and Philadelphia. While “Arab music” emanates from the cafes, he sees “[m]en out of work, with nothing to do and no place to go” as they stand sullenly in groups on street corners. He sees police patrolling the streets with “submachine guns strung from their shoulders.”