The following text is adapted from James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room. The narrator is riding in a taxi down a street lined with food vendors and shoppers in Paris, France.

The multitude of Paris seems to be dressed in blue every day but Sunday, when, for the most part, they put on an unbelievably festive black. Here they were now, in blue, disputing, every inch, our passage, with their wagons, handtrucks, their bursting baskets carried at an angle steeply self-confident on the back.

©1956 by James Baldwin