“In the years in Paris, I had never been homesick for anything American,” James Baldwin wrote in his 1972 book of essays,
No Name in the Street. “But,” he added just a page or two later, “I had missed my brothers and my sisters … I missed Harlem Sunday mornings and fried chicken and biscuits.”
I’m thinking about these lines as I bite into a piece of fried chicken the thinly breaded skin crispy, the inside juicy enough that I need to wipe my lips while sitting in front of Gumbo Yaya. The tiny restaurant’s red facade bursts through the otherwise grayish nook it occupies at the northeastern edge of Paris’s 10th Arrondissement, just streets away from the French Communist Party’s curving, concrete, Oscar Niemeyer-designed headquarters.