Magical Identification with Bali in France

In his autobiography, African-American novelist Langston Hughes relates an anecdote about a night out in Paris in 1937 with his friend, John P. Davis, a Harvard-educated African-American activist, and later publisher:

We had gone night-clubbing along rue Pigalle and had met a charming girl who said she was from Java, part Dutch and part Javanese, but who spoke hesitant English and broken French with a Georgia drawl. John Davis whispered to me over the champagne he had bought that he was sure she was colored, from somewhere in Dixie, passing for Javanese in Paris, which amused him greatly. The girl was so exotic-looking that I doubted she was American, and disputed his insistence on it. I was wrong. Later I ran into the girl in New York talking perfectly good Harlemese, and not passing for anything on Lenox Avenue where she was quite at home.

(Hughes 1993: 402f.)

Hughes portrays his friend Davis as finding drunken amusement in the idea of a Southern black woman passing for part-Javanese, while Hughes himself approaches passing rationally, almost clinically — categorizing accents, expressing doubt, disputing.¹ The anonymous woman presents a puzzle of how the homely might transform into the exotic. One answer is to be found in the settings. Harlem’s Lenox Avenue and Paris’ Pigalle were synonymous with jazz clubs, and the ‘charming girl’ is thus marked as a performer working a transatlantic axis — most likely a dancer as her language production is described as hesitant and broken.