The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence

Praise for Tracy Whiting’s (T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s) just-released nonfiction work, “Bricktop’s Paris”:

“
Bricktop’s Paris
vibrantly recreates and reimagines the fascinating world of Jazz Age Paris by placing black women at the center of the story. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting gives us a valuable new perspective on Ada “Bricktop” Smith, giving her the prominence usually attributed to Josephine Baker. She also provides detailed portraits of other singers, musicians, writers, and artists who left America for the French capital. Written with enthusiasm and insight,
Bricktop’s Paris
underscores the importance of women to transatlantic black modernity.”

—Tyler Stovall, author of
Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light

“
Bricktop’s Paris
is a remarkable feat. Sharpley-Whiting’s book is a woman’s story about dreaming and making dreams happen. It is a political story, a story about migration, and re-creation. It is a dazzling account of bold women reshaping their lives as New Women/Modern Women and black women in Europe. A woman’s place is not only viewed in the sphere of domesticity through Sharpley-Whiting’s writing, she also reimagines the complexity of life far away from home and on stage, in the studio, and in the nightclub. She captures their spirit and desires and walks us through this history arm and arm, singing, writing, dancing, and making art. I fell in love with these women as I empathized with their struggles, some of them I knew through other writings but through Sharpley-Whiting I felt as if I knew them intimately as they made their lives count some fifty years after Reconstruction. She restores their voices and their bodies and makes them present for the contemporary reader. Brilliant!”

— Deborah Willis, author of
Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present

Also by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting

Black Venus
is a feminist study of the representations of black women in the literary, cultural, and scientific imagination of nineteenth-century France. Employing psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, and the critical race theory articulated in the works of Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting argues that black women historically invoked both desire and primal fear in French men. By inspiring repulsion, attraction, and anxiety, they gave rise in the nineteenth-century French male imagination to the primitive narrative of Black Venus.

Pimps Up, Ho’s Down
pulls at the threads of the intricately knotted issues surrounding young black women and hip hop culture. What unravels for Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting is a new, and problematic, politics of gender. In this fascinating and forceful book, Sharpley-Whiting, a feminist writer who is a member of the hip hop generation, interrogates the complexities of young black women’s engagement with a culture that is masculinist, misogynistic, and frequently mystifying.

The 13
TH
FELLOW

BY

TRACY WHITING

booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.

The 13TH Fellow

Copyright 2015 by Tracy Whiting

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-9904543-9-7

www.booksbnimble.com

First booksBnimble electronic publication: April 2015

Digital Editions (epub and mobi formats) produced by
Booknook.biz

Contents

Start Reading

Full Table of Contents

“Even a lie is a kind of truth.”

—Robert Penn Warren,
Who Speaks for the Negro?

Author’s Note

In three dimensions, there is no Félibrige Foundation, no Félibrige board, not one single Félibrige member. When the members of the society of poets founded by Frédéric Mistral died, the Félibrige Society, along with their little movement promoting the Occitan language in Provence, went with them. French is the language of France; and only French must be spoken in France. (
Vive la France
?) There are no new members or 21st century manifestations— certainly none so colorful (and criminally inclined) as the ones depicted herein! No boards, nothing, zilch. The Félibrige is dead. Long live the Félibrige!

PART I

The Briar Patch

I

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Paris, France, Monday, June 21
^st
, 2010

As she bounced up the steps of the Vavin metro stop, Havilah Gaie could see the sky was about to open up. The network of trains comprising Paris’s underground metro system had transported over a century of bodies. The Métro had a smell unto itself. Not quite funky or stale but certainly cavernous, slightly musty, and definitely old. So she inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with fresh air.

The morning had started out sunny and warm. Now tepid droplets pelted her. They began wetting the unprotected tablet of paper filled with the meticulous notes she had taken two days earlier after spending four hours in the Cabinet des Estampes at the Bibliothèque nationale. She had raced through the library’s cobblestone courtyard that morning in anticipation of collecting photocopies of several pages of a rare manuscript from its reproduction services.

The library opened at 9 a.m. She was there at 9:10, greeted by that French brusqueness that some call surly. She was glad her work took her to the archives at Rue Richelieu. She preferred the neoclassical architecture of the Richelieu library with its fine masonry, columns, and vaults. Though she decidedly favored the late president François Mitterrand’s leftist politics, the steel and glass monstrosity of a library named in his honor felt a bit too cold, modern, and functional. She thought libraries should have a whiff of the Old World. They were for her romantic places that kept history and secrets. A lover of knowledge could go there to discover the surreptitious, the serendipitous. And they would be sated.

She glanced down briefly to see the red ink on the page chasing a clear droplet. Flipping the tablet on its cardboard side, she made it into a makeshift umbrella and picked up the pace of her stride. She contemplated stopping at one of the cafés to grab a bite to eat.
A few more streets
, she thought, as she hustled between raindrops in the Carrefour Vavin and turned onto Rue Notre Dame des Champs. She looked down occasionally, remembering the travails of walking in Paris. She had barely skipped over a noted fixture on French city streets— a mound of brown goo left by the canine best friend of some Parisian.
Dog shit. Everywhere.
It was the one thing she couldn’t understand about France.

Her long legs shuttled her quickly to the large, cast-iron gated door fronting a complex of apartments.
6247b
,
6247b
. She punched the keypad. A click allowed passage into a neat stone courtyard filled with leafy green plants. Clusters of red, orange, yellow, and pink spilled out of balcony flower boxes in every direction.

She pushed through the first of two sets of glass doors to the building, opening the second with her key. The elevator door opened and whisked her to the sixth floor. As she rounded the corner, she could hear the apartment phone jangling. Three turns of three locks and the orange steel door gave way to a gleaming white-furnished loft apartment. Whoever decorated the apartment had been channeling Phillip Starck.

It was spacious, with two levels, and light-filled from the ceiling to floor windows that ran along an entire wall. In the evenings, she could see the twinkling lights of the upper observation platform of the Eiffel Tower from the apartment’s outside balcony.

She lunged for the telephone, skidding on the droplets she tracked onto the tumbled travertine tiles. The ringing stopped. Havilah still picked up the receiver only to hear the dial tone. She glanced at her watch. She had a 3:45 flight to Marseille. She would have taken the high speed TGV, but the times didn’t work for her. So air travel it was. Her driver to Orly airport was scheduled for a 12:30 pick up.

* * *

Havilah went to the compact kitchen area to retrieve a paper napkin. Her pastel-flowered Converse sneakers squeaked on the floor. Removing them, she placed the sneakers on the doormat to dry and began wiping the area where she had just walked. She then dashed up the stairs to the spacious loft where a queen-sized bed and full bath were. She grabbed a medium-sized, croc-trimmed, buttery calf-skinned carry-on from a large closet that also stored bed and bath linens. The apartment intercom sounded. She looked at the wall clock. Ten minutes after twelve. The driver was early.

“
Professeure Gaie
?” a French male voice inquired.

“
Oui, c’est qui à l’appareil
?” she asked though fully knowing the answer.

“
C’est Capitaine Jacques Noubard avec la Préfecture de police
,” the bureaucratic voice intoned.

Stunned, she pressed the buzzer to open the building’s main door.

* * *

The two officers excused themselves profusely as they entered the apartment.

“You speak French very well, Mademoiselle.
Je suis désolé
. I am sorry, Professor,” the dwarfish blond stumbled over protocol as he complimented her, his eyes still canvassing her hands and the apartment.

There were two things that she had come to find quite endearing about the French. An American had only to attempt to speak French and you were generously complimented. Havilah Gaie, though, was a polyglot with native fluency in French, Italian, and German. She was also conversant in Arabic and Hindi. Her training as a specialist in global conflicts and comparative democracy and citizenship required fluency in several languages.

That second endearing French quality involved the use of Mademoiselle. Clearly the captain was looking for some symbol of matrimony. She had found that even those who never saw her hands, male or female, often referred to her as Mademoiselle. She looked much younger than her 34 years.

“
Merci, monsieur
.”

She had responded almost mechanically to his compliment about her French, noting the insignia of the French national police as well as the rank on the blond man’s uniform. The other officer of the law was dressed like a very well-heeled French civilian, all in black.

“Professor Havilah Paige Gaie, I am Thierry Gasquet,” the tailored suit offered. “I am with the Service de protection des hautes personnalités, a special division of the French National Police, and this is Captain Jacques Noubard. He is with the Paris prefecture.”

It was rare that she encountered a Frenchman taller than her five feet nine inches, but this Thierry Gasquet was a good three inches taller, and his English was Americanized with barely a trace of a French accent. He didn’t even drop the ‘H’ in her first name.

“Can I ask why you are here? Forgive me. But I am not a high-ranking personality in need of special police services.” She nervously grabbed a handful of dark brown curls and placed them behind an ear.

The two men looked curiously at one another. The agent nodded to the blond captain. “You underestimate how greatly we admire your work, Professor. You are part of the
Ordre des Palmes Académiques
, which makes you a very esteemed guest in France.”

Havilah smiled sheepishly now. It was a high honor, but one she rarely thought about. She was merely doing what she loved— research and writing. She often forgot how seriously the French took the life of the mind and valued the academic enterprise. This was the land of the Panthéon, the Académie Française, Rousseau, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, after all.

“But more to the point,” the captain continued, “you have
’eard
of a Monsieur
Latan
Conor Beirnes, n’est-ce pas?” It was a statement more than a question from the captain.

“Why yes.
Lathan
‘Kit’ Beirnes is my colleague at Astor University in the U.S. I intend to see him this evening in Cassis at a dinner.” She didn’t know why she felt the need to return the dropped ‘h’ to her colleague’s name. The
th
and
h
were bedeviling consonants for the French, as was their rolling
r
for Americans. “We are both giving remarks at a centennial celebrating William Knowlton, the founder of the Félibrige Foundation. I’m also on the foundation’s board. In fact, I have a plane to catch shortly and my driver should be arriving in a few minutes.”