Something about being on Nina Simone Avenue here in Montpellier reminds me that Black Americans, and Black people who, in the words of Maya Angelou, were “bought, sold, stolen...arriving on a nightmare and praying for a dream…”—those of us descended from stolen Africans and here because of the transatlantic slave trade, have always been what Tricia Hersey, author of Rest Is Resistance, calls master escape artists and ultimate tricksters.
I’m reminded of Black people who, through petit or grand maroonage, escaped the horrors of slavery in search of freedom.
And freedom for them didn’t look like green pastures and mocktails at 4 p.m.
It looked like dense forests and dangerous swamps. Places filled with creatures that were no friend to them. The unknown.
And still, many enslaved people chose the uncertainty of the swamp or the forest over the certainty of enslavement.
Because at least in the swamp, at least in the forest, they were free.
And so when I’m on Nina Simone Avenue here in Montpellier, I think about Nina. I think about James Baldwin. Josephine Baker. And the many other Black Americans who left the United States for France or elsewhere.
Not because those places were perfect. They weren’t. They weren’t free of racism or contradiction or their own histories of violence.
But they offered something America could not...or would not.
Reprieve. Rest. Space. Another way of seeing themselves.
And I imagine that in leaving, many of them found pieces of themselves they may never have been able to locate had they stayed in the United States.
That feels connected to the escape artist.
And then I think again about Tricia Hersey’s language of the trickster.
I think about Henry “Box” Brown, who literally shipped himself in a box to freedom.
I think about Frederick Douglass using disguise and borrowed papers to escape slavery.
I think about Harriet Tubman, moving through darkness, changing routes, reading danger, outwitting people and systems determined to keep Black people captive.
Master tricksters and ultimate escape artists.
There is something in that history that reminds me that Black people have always moved.
We have migrated, escaped, fled, searched, crossed borders and made new ground.
Sometimes within the confines of the United States. Sometimes far beyond them.
Sometimes because leaving was the only way to discover what else might be possible. People, who just wanted to know how it feels to be free (see what I did there? And if you didn't scroll to the bottom)*.
And there is something deeply moving to me about Nina Simone being commemorated here, in Montpellier, France. A Black American woman whose life and work reached far enough that her name now lives on a street thousands of miles from where she was born.
It makes my heart swell.
I joke sometimes that I’m terrible at documenting my travels. I take horrible pictures. I forget to take videos. Half the time I don’t photograph the things I probably “should.”
I don’t even have a picture of the Nina Simone Avenue sign. I tried to find it. I asked people where it was. Nobody seemed to know. So somewhere in Montpellier there is apparently a street sign with Nina Simone’s name on it, and I have no photographic evidence whatsoever. I just know I was there, on the avenue named after her, and for me that was enough.
But I’m realizing that maybe photographs aren’t really the way I archive travel. Never was.
I synthesize and I make meaning across patterns.
I see something in the present and instinctively reach backward for what came before it. Then I look forward and ask what it might mean for what comes next.
I look at where I’m standing and think about the historical precedents beneath my feet and the futures extending out from them.
I go somewhere, experience something, and then I go back and get it and then spring forward to the future.
The history, the pattern and the meaning.
I bring those things together in a way that is particular to how I move through the world.
And I love that about myself.
So even without the photograph, Nina Simone Avenue has become something for me.
A reminder of Black American resilience. A reminder of our inheritance as people who have always searched for freedom. A reminder that when the place we are standing cannot hold the fullness of who we are, there is precedent for moving.
For finding another patch of ground.
For crossing a border.
For disappearing into the forest.
For getting on the ship.
For getting on the train.
For putting yourself in the damn box if that is what freedom requires.
For leaving one place in search of another place where some previously inaccessible part of you might finally be allowed to breathe.
That is part of why I travel, why I leave places.
I am looking for the spaces where I can be more free, more me.
Merci, Nina! Merci!
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