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Simeon Brown is an African American journalist who moves to Paris after a violent encounter with white sailors. In Paris, he meets new friends and falls in love with a Polish actress who is a concentration camp survivor. However, he becomes aware that Paris is not a racial utopia as he witnesses Algerians being oppressed by the French government. Through his friendship with Ahmed, an Algerian radical, Simeon is forced to consider where his loyalties lie.
As a teenager, Simeon Brown lost an eye in a racist attack, and this young African American journalist has lived in his native Philadelphia in a state of agonizing tension ever since. After a violent encounter with white sailors, Simeon makes up his mind to move to Paris, known as a safe haven for black artists and intellectuals, and before long he is under the spell of the City of Light, where he can do as he likes and go where he pleases without fear. Through Babe, another black American émigré, he makes new friends, and soon he has fallen in love with a Polish actress who is a concentration camp survivor. At the same time, however, Simeon begins to suspect that Paris is hardly the racial wonderland he imagined: The French government is struggling to suppress the revolution in Algeria, and Algerians are regularly stopped and searched, beaten, and arrested by the French police, while much worse is to come, it will turn out, in response to the protest march of October 1961. Through his friendship with Ahmed, an Algerian radical, Simeon realizes that he can no longer remain a passive spectator to French injustice. He must decide where his true loyalties lie.
A courageous novel. . . . The Stone Face represents the maturing of a voice determined to confound preconceived notions about patriotism, Blackness and sanctuary, and accordingly the story takes no prisoners, so to speak.
A thought-provoking and an oddly humanizing and liberating book.
This forthright, morally engaging 1963 novel by a neglected Black expat author applies a distinctly international perspective to questions of race and class. . . Far more than his contemporaries Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin, Smith (1927–74) parlayed his experiences in Paris into universal explorations of race, caste, and colonialism, earning him a place alongside them on library shelves.
The book dates from 1963, but although it is set in Paris, it was released in French after being included in the New York Review of Books Classics series of suggested editions. Finally available in our language, it takes on new life sixty years after the massacre of the Algerians on October 17, 1961, revealing very boldly and very early the hideous, multidimensional face of racism.
William Gardner Smith
