I Always Knew

August 1, 2022
An acclaimed Black artist and writer's memoir of her life and education, told in a series of letters to her mother. While awaiting the results of the 2008 election--which yielded the first Black president, Barack Obama, a turn of history that in 1983 the author deemed "an impossibility"--Chase-Riboud (b. 1939) read through more than 600 letters that she had written to her mother from Europe between 1957 and 1991. Those letters mark her interesting journey from an ing�nue who marveled at the groaning-board meals aboard the ocean liner to a world-renowned artist. Soon after her arrival, she wrote, "What about this Russian satellite? I didn't know anything about it until it had circled the globe for about three days. America must be hysterical....Most of the French seem rather pleased. They really believe in this balance of power idea and they are just as afraid of the U.S. as they are of Russia." It wasn't long until Chase-Riboud, a graduate of Yale's School of Design and Architecture, was showing her paintings and sculptures in galleries and competitions and beginning to travel around the world. In 1958, the Middle East director of the Coca-Cola Corporation asked, "what was a lone American girl doing wandering around the Middle East without guide or chaperone in the midst of the Suez Canal War?" The author's travels took her to China, Mongolia, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. At the same time, she was blossoming as a writer, and she went on to publish numerous books of poetry and fiction, closely observing the places she visited and sharing her enthusiasms and successes with her mother. "Our landscape really resembles a kind of 18th-century English landscape painting--flat, beautiful light dotted here and there with huge oak trees," she exulted from a sojourn in the French countryside as she prepared to go to Senegal to exhibit her artwork. A charming epistolary record of a life of art and discovery, well and fully lived.

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Starred review from September 1, 2022
The life of artist and writer Barbara Chase-Riboud is so fantastical it strains credulity. Born to an upper-middle-class Black family in Philadelphia, she became the first Black woman to receive an MFA from Yale. After graduation in 1960, she left for Europe to make sculpture and has never lived full time in the U.S. again. Yet she remained close to her mother, Vivian, resulting in a remarkable, four-decade correspondence, the source of this memoir-in-letters. The two women shared thoughts about family life and fashion sprinkled with Chase-Riboud's wry observations of social, political, and artistic revolution in Paris and the U.S. Riboud wrote to her mother almost weekly while hanging out with her photographer husband's pals Henri Cartier-Bresson and Salvador Dali, traveling as the first American woman to visit Communist China, and even in lockdown during the May 1968 Parisian revolt. As Chase-Riboud's career took off, she confronted racist assumptions about Black art. An unexpected invitation to vacation with Jackie Onassis sparked a 20-year friendship and the genesis of Chase-Riboud's best-selling novel based on an earlier presidential "consort," Sally Hemings. Much like the seventeenth-century Madame de S�vign�, Chase-Riboud weaves celebrity encounters, political bombshells, and artistic trends into lively, chatty tales, preserving her experiences of climactic events and her devoted relationship with her witty, often acerbic mother.

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