Paulette Richards

“It would take an act of god,” I thought when I submitted my application for a Fulbright fellowship to teach American and African American Literature in Senegal.  I was a French major who had never found the resources to study or work in a francophone country.  I had passed the written test but failed the oral exam for Foreign Service applicants three times.  I had applied to the Peace Corps four times without success.  So last March when I learned I had been selected as a Fulbright Fellow for the 2013-2014 academic year, I broke down and cried.

When I left Atlanta for Senegal on an Air France flight operated by Delta Air Lines, I thought that Aéropostale was just the name of a retail outlet.  Although the exploits of Jean Mermoz and other Aéropostale aviators rank with those of the Wright brothers or Charles Lindberg, I had never heard of these cockpit cowboys who pioneered an airborne equivalent of the Pony Express.

If a little Senegalese girl is lucky enough to own a doll, it will most likely be white.  Consequently girls often name their dolls “Bébé Toubab.”  Since toubab means “foreigner,” it applies to black Americans like me as well as to Europeans and Asians but outside of the display dolls made for the tourist trade, there are almost no dolls that look like people of African descent available here in Senegal.