Paris Insights - The Blog

I recently attended a presentation of an exhibit entitled The Resurgence of Erased Black Cemeteries given by curator Pauline Peretz at the Humathèque library of the Condorcet Campus in Aubervilliers, a town located just outside of Paris.

Located in the great entrance hall of the library, the exhibit consists of a series of photographs posted to large panels with descriptive text (in French).

During her 90-minute presentation, Madame Peretz walked to each panel and talked about eleven cemeteries in the United States that had been forcibly abandoned, forgotten or “erased” due to construction projects, then rediscovered.

In the photograph above, she is talking about the Zion Cemetery in Tampa, Florida. This cemetery, founded in 1901, was abandoned in the 1920s when the owner, an African-American businessman, could not pay taxes that the city illegally imposed upon him. During the 1950s, the city built an apartment complex on the land. In 2019, while consulting city directories, a Tampa Bay Times journalist realized that the complex had been built over the burial ground.

Today, there is an ongoing effort by the Zion Cemetery Preservation and Maintenance Society and the Tampa Housing Authority to restore the cemetery to its rightful dignity.

The exhibit presents information about multiple cemeteries in Florida and Virginia, as well as a cemetery in Houston, Texas and the African Burial Ground in Manhattan. It will continue through May 3, 2025.

The Humathèque library can be accessed from Paris via the number 12 line of the city metro system. The library is a five-minute walk from the Front Populaire metro station.

I ventured into Noir Café on the corner of rue Monge and rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the 5th arrondissement to purchase roasted coffee beans.

The café is spacious with warm brown tones. In the center of the café, seating is provided by stools around low polished blocks that look as though they have been hewn from marble. Seating was also provided at the windows by blocks of this material. I did not find this austere ambiance very comforting, but I proceeded to the counter to order an espresso.

The barista was helpful and answered my questions about the coffee. She told me that the coffee beans are roasted at their facility in the town of Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine.

I ordered a cup of Hambela, an Ethiopian coffee from the Yirgacheffe region of that country, and took it to a window seat, where I tasted it. (The seating on the block of “marble” was not comfortable. I learned later that the material is called cultured marble and that it is a man-made product that contains dyes, marble dust and resin.) While I sipped the coffee, rap music played softly over the sound system.

After tasting the espresso, I purchased a 200g container of the roasted bean, took it home, and prepared an espresso with my 9Barista stove-top espresso machine.

I found the taste to be intense and much like the espresso I had experienced at the café. Because of the intensity, it was difficult to discern notes, or flavors, in the coffee. About all I could say was that it tasted “floral.”

I decided to try brewing the coffee using Melitta paper filter in a coffee cone. This technique produced a milder coffee and allowed the flavors of the coffee to open. The flavors indicated on the label of the container are the following: apricot, floral jasmine, and toffee. I thought that I detected notes of floral jasmine in the coffee. It was an agreeable flavor for me.

Noir
29 bis, rue Monge
75005 Paris