"American blacks, symbols of suffering, were posing as communists to trap sympathetic white Frenchmen who hovered about them!...Goddamn! This town crawls with serpents, Fishbelly told himself, realizing that almost all the people he had so far met in Paris had been wearing false faces" (Richard Wright Island of Hallucinations 105).

On the surface, Richard Wright’s Island of Hallucinations and William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face resemble one another a great deal. Both novels address the problem of race in the West, and examine the vicissitudes of identity and affiliation among the African American expatriates in Cold War Paris. A strange intrigue develops, however, when the novels are read side-by-side. Wright’s novel (unpublished) transitions from an antiracist protest piece to a spy novel, involving African American men who are hired by the U.S. State Department to spy on one another and to identify French communists. Smith’s novel also moves beyond questions of antiblack racism to include anti-Semitism and Arabophobia during the Algerian War, although it does not take up the theme of spying to extent that Wright’s did. Wright’s recent biographers mention, however, that Smith was considered by most members of the expat community to be a CIA operative. Smith’s novel also contains a damning portrait of Wright, while Wright’s novel includes a vicious caricature said to be either James Baldwin or Gardner Smith. Throughout Wright and Smith’s novels, questions of race, communism, war, colonialism and France’s relationship to America overlap and intersect in startling new combinations. In this paper I will be teasing out the specifics of these themes as they relate to the Cold War context of these two novels, while attempting to clarify the espionage, suspicion, intrigue and betrayal that beset Wright and Smith in particular, if not the African-American community in Paris at large.