I ALWAYS KNEW

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 ingénue 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.