Below is an excerpt from America Day by Day, University of California Press, 1999, a new translation of her 1948 book: L'Amérique au jour le jour.
Background
With a letter of introduction from her close companion, Jean Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir, at age 39, takes a four month U.S. cross-country trip. This book is based upon her diary entries of that trip.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) is an important 20th century essayist, novelist, and philosopher; and an influential proponent of feminism (The Second Sex, 1949). Many consider her the major 20th century theoretician of contemporary feminism. She studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne, and in 1929 at the age of 21, passed the philosophy aggregation examination, making her the youngest in France to ever do so. It was here, at the Sorbonne, that de Beauvoir met Jean-Paul Sartre. They became lovers and intellectual partners and are considered to be the founders of French existentialism. Later, she also became lover and companion to famed Chicago writer Nelson Algren. Algren, a frequent visitor to Maxwell Street, was probably one of those who suggested she visit there. - SB
Maxwell Street, 1947
This afternoon C. L. has left her bookshop to join me on a walk through the streets of Chicago. On the edge of the black, Greek, and Italian neighborhoods, we discover, by chance, one of the biggest markets I've seen since the Djelma el Fna Square in Marrakech. It stretches for more than a mile along the pavement and sidewalks of a broad street. The sun is punishing, a midsummer sun, and dark Chicago has suddenly become an exotic village, hot and colorful, the way I'd imagined San Francisco would be. The men are wearing shirts of pale blue, delicate green, shrimp pink, salmon, mauve, sulfur yellow, and indigo, and they let their shirts hang outside their trousers. Many women have knotted the ends of their white blouses above their navels, revealing a broad strip of midriff between skirt and bodice. There are many black faces, others olive, tan, and white, often shaded by large straw hats. To the right, to the left, people in wooden stalls sell silk dressing gowns, shoes, cotton dresses, jewelry, blankets, little tables, lemons, hot dogs, scrap iron, furs-an astonishing mixture of junk and solid merchandise, a yard sale mixed with low-priced luxury. On the pavement small cars drive around selling ice cream, Coca-Cola, and popcorn; in a glass cage the flickering flame of a little lamp heats the kernels and makes them pop. There's a tiny man in rags with the face of an Indian, wearing a big straw hat and with a hearing device fixed behind his dirty ear; he's telling fortunes with the help of a machine. The apparatus is very complicated, truly magical: on a moving cart there's a glass column full of liquid in which little dolls jump up and down. A customer approaches- a black woman with a naked midriff, who seems at once provocative, skeptical, and intimidated. She puts her hand against the glass; the bottle-imps jump up and sink into the invisible depths of the instrument, which spits out a strip of pink paper on which the customer's fate is written. This mechanical apparatus in the service of magic, the hearing aid beneath the exotic hat, these juxtapositions give this market its unexpected character. It's an eighteenth-century fair in which drugstore products are sold amid the clamor of four or five radios. There's another charlatan worthy of the old Pont Neuf. He has a snake around his neck and is selling black elixir that's supposed to be a cure all, and he describes the fabulous properties of this universal panacea through a microphone. Another man specializes in headaches, curing them through a simple laying on of hands. He too pitches his sales talk through a microphone, and behind him there's a highly scientific anatomical drawing representing the human brain. There are shops on the sidewalks, often below street level, as in the Jewish neighborhood in New York, and their merchandise spills onto the pavement. Through in open door, I see a gypsy covered scarves and veils in a darkened room; she's kneeling beside a basin, washing her linen. The radios blare, and each is playing a different tune.
On the street corner, some blacks are holding a religious meeting. The men are in ordinary clothes, but the women wear long robes and veils edged in white, just like the nuns of certain orders. They are singing in chorus, and above their heads, a black family is sitting on a balcony lazily listening to them singing stirring spirituals. A little farther on, a black preacher is speaking passionately, and guitarists are playing jazz tunes on the edge of the sidewalk. Another black speaker with a red skullcap is gesticulating vehemently: he angrily singles out other preachers for preaching the God of the white man; in contrast, he is invoking the God of black people, and he exhorts his brothers to come to him and no one else. Sects that are openly against white people have arisen recently, but only a few. For the most part they are Islamic, worshiping the god of Muhammad, not the Christian god, and they took to the brown people of Asia Minor and Africa for the salvation of the black race. This preacher probably belongs to the "Moors," which is not only a religious sect but also a small economic community with a harem. It includes two hundred blacks, mostly women, who live in one of the nearby slums. We listen, we look. Superstitions, science, religion, food, physical and spiritual remedies, rags, silks, popcorn, guitars, radios- what an extraordinary mix of all the civilizations and races that have existed throughout time and space. In the hands of merchants, preachers, and charlatans, the snares sparkle and the street is full of the chatter of thousands of brightly feathered birds. Yet under the blue sky, the grayness of Chicago persists. At the end of the avenue that crosses the glowing bazaar, the pavement and light are the color of water and dust.
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