HEADNOTE

Since the early 1920s, Jessie Redmon Fauset played an integral role in ushering in various African American writers who were engaging with topics such as literature, political and historical research, and Black culture. Through her professional relationship with W.E.B. Du Bois, Fauset gained the opportunity to publish for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and later, The Crisis. Over the seven years in her editorial role, Fauset was central to the Harlem Renaissance. In this position, Fauset introduced readers to the early works of writers such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, supporting a variety of generic pieces including poetry, nonfiction, and book reviews. While Fauset’s editorial work introduced new forms of Black literary culture to the public, her literary/creative work was equally significant in detailing depictions of inequalities of race and class. In her travel narrative “This Way to the Flea Market” (1925), Fauset details an ordinary day in Paris as she travels to a local flea market. Instead of visiting the iconic sights of Paris, Faucet explores ordinary locations, such as an underprivileged school and a flea market, which helps her examine the conditions of the poor in relation to the people of Harlem. Fauset’s attention to the issue of poverty and class inequality in French society echoes her concerns of systemic racism in America, and especially New York City. Paris is not all that different from Harlem.

In Fauset’s ‘This Way to the Flea Market’, her writing demonstrates not only an attention to the Black experience outside of America, but also to the conditions of living in a foreign country as an African American (Popp 131). Through Fauset’s short essay, we see her survey social issues that plague poor individuals in Paris much like Black individuals in urban America. By drawing attention to the Parisian neighborhoods, its people, and their poor economic conditions, Fauset is able to critique a consumer culture that harms and isolates marginalized and poor communities (Goldsmith 222). Like much of Fauset’s previous works that discuss the position of the black artist (Wall 68), ‘This Way to the Flea Market’ offers scholars and students of African American literature another means of examining the cultural and political realities against the backdrop of a foreign place. It also provides African American readers then and now an opportunity to visualize their place in a global society, since the experience of Blackness abroad is not quite the experience of Blackness in the United States. Scholars such as Gary Totten and Meredith Goldsmith facilitate this work of the ongoing reevaluation of the significance of Fauset’s oeuvre to the canon of American literature. Yet they also help readers to consider how Fauset’s writing expands conversation about literary representations of black mobility, class consciousness, and racism both domestic and abroad, then and now.

Editorial work on this entry by Nelsie Valenzuela

‘This Way to the Flea Market’ (1925)

My friend said: “I think you ought to visit the Flea Market.” I looked at her with amazement and some distaste for I was still smarting under the memory of my encounter with one of the pests during my first few days in Paris.

Presently she explained. Just outside of one of the gates of Paris – for Paris being a fortified city has several gates – there is held every Sunday from nine until four, a vast bazaar called the “Marché aux Puces,” the “Flea Market,” where one may buy all sorts of articles at considerable advantage. Originally the name was given because only very old and usually stolen wares were put on sale. But now both old and new objects are to be had and the market is a fully recognized and legitimate business.

Accordingly the next Sunday I started for the Porte de Clignancourt and the Marché aux Puces. My friend’s father was to accompany me, not only to show me the way but also to do the bargaining. “You look too easy,” said my candid friend, “you need some one to look them in the eye and beat them at their own game for the moment they spy a foreigner they immediately raise the price.”

The father, a sturdy, grizzled, kindly Alsatian, was not at all like the Alsatian shepherd boy of the song. Indeed had I seen him in America I should have taken him without further thought for a German. Thus constantly are shaken my preconceptions with regard to the appearance of the French; they run so persistently contrary to type, that is to the type which we are told in America they most resemble. My guide knew his own neighborhood thoroughly and took me to a small Savings Bank, open for deposit on Sunday; to a church and, most interesting of all, to a small carpenter-shop designed for youngsters where boys of all sorts and conditions were happily engaged in drawing and planning and hammering. “Some of them,” said their instructor, “do it for fun and others because they have a genuine feeling for the trade.” This shop was part of a large school for poor children. Compulsory education has just been established in France and has been taken up with great thoroughness; in this one ward are fifty-two such institutions! Not only is the instruction free – an innovation for the French – but a luncheon is served gratis to the pupils every day.

At last we boarded the tramway and rode the length of Boulevard Ornano to the Porte de Clignancourt and the Flea Market. I was not impressed at first for I saw to one side only a few booths, very much as we see sometimes on the East Side in New York, and on these booths were exhibited very ordinary articles of commerce – neckties, soap, powder, stockings. But presently the boulevard halted, vanished, to reappear in a broad muddy plain covered entirely with tents, booths, portable shops, vans, even desolate automobiles. There was visible a rough sort of plan; lanes ran between a double line of counters, to be met at right angles by other lanes; you could see that you really were in a market with the grey French sky for covering and the deep sticky mud beneath your feet. That mud! There is no mud I am convinced like unto French mud; it is black, it is viscous, it is thick, yet somehow it contrives to spatter and to penetrate and is “of a wetness!”

But the clientele of the Marché aux Puces did not care about mud. Nor did I – there were far too many other things to consider. Not even in a big department store do I remember such a variety of objects. As far as I can recall there were no fruits or vegetables, nor indeed any edibles except some cough candy made from the dried berries of the eucalyptus tree. I bought some of this as a safeguard against the effects of the mud and as it tasted like a mixture of camphor and menthol I suppose it would hardly come in the category of edibles. But they were the only objects missing.

Very often as I gaze around the interior of a large shop catering as modern stores do to an appreciable portion of the increasing number of our needs, I wonder what Adam and Eve would think if they might spy just once the first aids to living which civilization has gathered about itself. They would, I think, murmur: “But we lived without any of these things! After all, Life is the important, the supreme end of existence; how can people be encompassed about with all these gee-gaws and yet find time to live?” Some such thought came to me at the Flea Market. Here were dolls, raincoats, show-blacking, underwear, perfumes, oil-paintings, rugs, blankets, vases, china, shoes, bicycles, old suits of clothes, hats, fans, candle-sticks, discarded curtain fixtures, table-mats, telephone boxes, cutlery, old-time firing pieces, swords, poniards, daggers, canes, rabbit-skins – my pen wearies of the enumeration.

Some of the wares were old, some perfectly new; some absolutely useless. Yet people were searching restlessly, feverishly through heaps of fixtures, rusty and even broken. Perhaps some hoped to find and to purchase for a few sous the one contrivance lacking to a world-astounding invention. The piles of worn and faded and altogether horrible clothing also had their devotees. Somehow I felt that it was from these garments and their too probable inhabitants that the market received its name. But the customers who would even envisage the thought of buying and wearing those garments could not afford to be too fastidious! The poor of Europe are very poor; they approach in the candor and simplicity of their idea of living the Adam and Eve of my conjecture. Life, the mere business of living, is their supreme occupation, let its trapping be as sordid, as infected as repellant as may be; so long as the precious jewel of life is contained therein, what matter? It is a hard philosophy, but an inevitable one in a people who have fought so long and so often for the right to survive; and it is a philosophy too, mind you, born of terrific experiences, not a mere dumb, driven acquiescence of the inequalities of life.

Buying and selling at the Flea Market is a great game. Every body haggles. The merchant to whom a customer handed over the amount of his first price would despise him even while enjoying the thought of his gain. My Alsatian friend had come from Mulhouse; hence when he picked up a picture showing the spires of the Cathedral of Strassburg and storks resting thereon, his rather impassive face quickened. He knew those surroundings; he had lived in Paris now for thirty-five years, but this – this was home. He asked the price. “Twenty francs,” he replied the merchant in a hard, unyielding tone. He was a psychologist; he knew that one would want that picture only for its associations; but it is for this sort of thing that men pay dear.

My friends was unimpressed. “What is your final price?” he inquired succinctly.

“Eighteen francs.”

“I’ll give you ten.”

The merchant did not even look up and we sauntered on very slowly for my friend knew that the end was not yet.

Presently came a loud “pst!” We returned.

“I’ll let you have it for eighteen francs.”

“I told you I’d give you ten.” Complete suspension of interest on the part of the vendor. We started off again.

“Hey, here’s your picture!” The ten francs and the painting crossed the counter. The picture was unwrapped and I wondered a little about this but my friend was prepared. He dived into a pocket and pulled out a newspaper in which he wrapped his purchase. Always bring a newspaper with you to the Marché aux Puces, he counseled; not enough profit is expected to admit of furnishing paper and string.

The women merchants are the hardest bargainers, seldom if ever yielding. I bought a rose and black beaded table mat at a price equivalent to one-third its cost in New York. My guide started to bargain with the woman who was selling, but her figure was her first and last. Some bantering followed: “You know I’ve got to live, Monsieur.”

“Yes, but you shouldn’t try to make all your profit on me.”

“I’m not trying to.” Shrewdly. It isn’t necessary for you to have the mat, but it is necessary for me to make my living. Il faut vivre, Monsieur.”

And not one sou would she yield. I was glad she would not. Her attitude, her calmness, her determination even to the point of grimness is characteristic of this class. There is something tremendously hard and stratified in the French character, a granite-like quality which results from this continuous necessity of being at grips with life itself. One always comes back to some evidence of that, the struggle for existence, the struggle with the soil and the struggle to keep the soil. And this struggle with its resulting hardness shows nowhere more plainly than in the poor and middle-class French woman. It is an extension of that instinct which makes the small and cornered animal fight so bitterly, converting him finally into a truly formidable opponent. Woman being the weaker creature must harden herself proportionately just that much more to meet the exigencies of her existence.

The vast quantity and profusion of merchandise scattered about intrigued of course my attention. But what really held me was the people; all sorts of a given class, with here and there a curious visitor like myself and my friend, but otherwise representative of the poorer groups of all those nationalities with which Paris teems. Many of the merchants were Poles and Russians, but among the changing crowds of customers were Greeks, Italians, Spanish, Tunisians, Algerians, Annamites, Chinese, Kabyles. These last formed a striking and easily detected group. They were all thin, all swarthy with a swarthiness different from that of the Italian, the American mulatto, or the Spaniard. They wore dull red fezzes, their hair was lank and oily, their faces grimed; yet even so one received an impression of pride and aloofness. They made me think of sick eagles. Old clothes were their lodestone. After fingering garments heavy with grease and dirt, they left them only to return and handle them once more. They were cold, poor things. Hardly sons of the desert they might be, yet not the least of such nostalgia as they felt could be traced back to an unvoiced sense of contrast between the dampness of a French winter and the baking sun of Africa.

By noon the crowd had doubled; by two it would be quadrupled; it would be difficult to twist one’s way out of the narrow, muddy lanes; by three the haggling would have reached its height, for merchandise must be disposed of in order to facilitate departure. At five o’clock that vast muddy expanse would be as barren of booths and of people as the sea.

I was surprised that so much vacant land should be lying unused at the very approach to a great city; one would have expected clusters of houses, small businesses, gardens, streets, and trees. But here was nothing but a trackless waste, the nearest houses towering aloofly, several hundred metres away. My friend told me that thus was the land left bare all around the city so that the approach of an army would readily be descried! This turned my thoughts again to the fortifications curving away from us enclosing the great proud city, the darling of the French, the Mecca of Europe, the glory of the world! Vast grey stone bastions, as tall as a two-story house, surrounded by a moat which could of necessity be flooded with water. “But we don’t do that any more,” said my companion, “since we have such wonderful cannon.”

The walls were as fascinating as the people. “A fortified city,” I murmured, “we never have them in America.” “But you would have them,” he replied grimly, “if you had the Germans for neighbors.” Always that fear of invasion keeping the military spirit in France alive and green.

And on that thought we left the market, left the seething, swarming crowds and the sordid, prosaic wares. A laughing youngster offering us a box of shoe-blacking, opened the box and pretended to lick it, closing his eyes in ecstasy because it was so good. “So shoe-blacking your favorite dish now,” bantered my Alsatian, “and how does it taste?” “It’s all right, my old one,” grinned back the boy, “you’d better buy some for mademoiselle!”

In front of us against a wintry-silver sunlight rose the mosque-like towers of Sacré Coeur. “Come in,” they beckoned, “you are welcome!” Behind us curved and closed the fortifications; viewed from this side they emanated security, protection. “Pass in,” they murmured, “You are safe!”

Source Text:

Fauset, Jessie R., ‘This Way to the Flea Market’, The Crisis, edited by Jessie Redmon Fauset, (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 1925), 161-63.

References:

Goldsmith, Meredith L. ‘Jessie Fauset’s Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, the Long Nineteenth Century, and the Legacy of Feminine Representation’, American Literary History and the Turn Toward Modernity, edited by Melanie V. Dawson and Meredith L. Goldsmith (University Press of Florida, 2018), 222-47.

Popp, Valerie, ‘Where Confusion Is: Transnationalism in the Fiction of Jessie Redmon Fauset.’ African American Review, 43.1 (Spring 2009), 131-44.

Totten, Gary, African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).

Wall, Cheryl A., “Histories and Heresies: Engendering the Harlem Renaissance,” Meridians, vol. 2.1 (2001), 59-76.

Image References:

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library. ‘Jessie Redmon Fauset’. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 17, 2023. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-1ed1-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99