Julia Browne has been guiding travellers through the history of Black Paris since 1994.

As the owner and founder Walking in the Spirit walking tours, Browne is an element of a vibrant enterprise that explores the deep, wealthy history of African Americans in Paris. For many black Americans, Paris represented liberation and an escape from the constant hum of racism.

For many reasons, this was not Browne’s reality.

“Honestly, it was somewhere else, and I liked being somewhere else,” Browne said during a recent interview from her home in Paris. “I liked being in a recent culture, and I liked looking around and never knowing what was occurring, and having the opportunity to discover what other people were doing. What life was all about.

“I wasn’t looking for freedom. It was a life that was more satisfying and closer to my personality.”

Browne’s journey has been as fascinating as the story her trips reveal. She became part of the black expat community in February 1990, when she left Canada and moved to a city that had resonated together with her since she was 10.

Browne was born in Yorkshire, England, after her parents emigrated from the island of St. Kitts in the Nineteen Fifties. They were part of the Windrush generation, made up of Commonwealth residents, particularly individuals and families from the Caribbean, who were invited to the UK to help rebuild Britain after World War II. When Browne was 8, the family moved to Ontario, Canada, in search of a more promising future. Her father left first, working in a logging camp. The rest of the family followed suit, settling in a small German village called Kitchener-Waterloo.

Browne said she was intrigued by France, the French and French culture in elementary school. She studied French and had a French pen pal in tenth grade. She’s undecided how or why her interests developed.

Her spirit was drawn to France normally and Paris specifically.

“There are certain ideas that come to you and you just go with them,” she said.

When Browne was 17, she discovered that her biological father, who was born in the Caribbean, was of French descent. She later discovered that her biological father had roots in Normandy.

Browne first went to Paris in the late Nineteen Seventies, when she was a flight attendant for Air Canada. Her introduction to France was unimpressive.

“I was disappointed because I didn’t like it, I didn’t like it at all,” she said. “I didn’t like the way people approached me, I just didn’t like it. That’s what happens when you don’t know what culture you’re entering and it’s so different from your own.”

When Air Canada laid off a whole lot of employees, Browne used her share-based advantages to enroll in a study abroad program at the University of Toronto. She settled in Aix-en-Provence, a city in southern France, north of Marseille.

It was there that Browne met the Frenchman who would turn into her husband. They returned to Montreal and married. After two years in Canada, Browne and her husband moved to Paris in 1990. They arrived on February 1, the birthday of poet and novelist Langston Hughes.

Browne didn’t have a grand plan. She definitely didn’t have plans to start a business based on exploring the wealthy history of African Americans in France.

This happened much later.

“The turning point came very gradually. It was coming to me,” she said. “It’s not something I ever thought I’d be doing. If you told me this was the job I’d be doing, I’d be like, ‘But it doesn’t even exist,’ because it didn’t.”

After a few years in Paris, Browne began hanging out with black expatriates. She met the author Davida Kilgore, who, like Browne, had studied at the Sorbonne. They became friends, and Kilgore introduced Browne to other black Americans.

“It took a conscious effort to get out and meet black Americans,” she said. “I was the odd one out because I was Canadian. My experience was different than Americans.”

Browne, on the other hand, was aware of black American culture, largely through television.

“We knew what African-American life was like. We knew some of the trials and tribulations. We could name all the big cities, we watched all the same TV shows,” she said. “I felt like I knew what it was like to be African-American, but I still had a distance from it because I hadn’t lived that way, so it was two different cultures.”

She knew enough about the history of black Americans to realize that the differences between them were significant.

“We felt safer in Canada,” she said. “We didn’t feel like there was as much prejudice and discrimination, but deep down we knew it was there. It wasn’t on the same level, it wasn’t as intrusive. It didn’t seem as obvious.”

For Browne, the opportunity to meet and talk with black Americans in Paris allowed her to see herself in a broader context: she was Canadian, born in the UK, but still black. Their stories were part of hers.

“It was a chance for me to hear what it was really like, beyond what you saw in the media. I wanted to know what it was like to be a black American as opposed to a Canadian. That’s still ongoing,” she said.

Today, he believes that the common thread between black Canadians and black Americans is that they’re all North Americans.

“But at that time I felt there was a boundary between us,” she said.

The seeds of Browne’s Black Americans in Paris travel business were planted while she was taking classes at the Sorbonne. One of her professors, Michel Fabre, who co-founded the Center for Afro-American Studies, wrote a book titled .

Browne took the book and walked the streets of Paris with it. She discovered, for instance, that Hughes lived near her apartment in the seventeenth arrondissement.

There were so many other gems she never knew about. “I love research, I love documentaries, I love learning,” Browne said. “I took the book and commenced walking around with it.

“It was so amazing to me that I kept doing it, walking around different places.”

During this time, Browne joined a group of black American women called the Sisters. During the group’s monthly meetings, Browne began to discuss her journeys and the history she was exploring.

“I was telling my sisters what I had discovered, and someone asked, ‘Can you show us some of these things?’ So I wrote some things down on cards and took some of my friends with me.”

Word of her informal tours spread, and when friends and relatives visited, they asked Browne to be their guide. “That’s literally how it started, I just started showing people around because someone had heard and someone had told someone else.”

In 1994, a magazine editor visited Paris. Browne took her on a tour, and she or he wrote a story about the tour. A reporter from the magazine later wrote about Browne’s Black Paris tour. “It just took off. It surprised me, but it was so much fun,” she said. “You feel the need and you just go for it.”

Browne recalls that regardless that the business became popular, at first the travel agencies she contacted didn’t consider their clients would want to take a Black Paris tour.

“I contacted travel agents in the States and asked them, ‘Do you think your clients would be interested in this?’ And they said, ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t see why,’” Browne said.

“It was travelers going back to their travel agents and saying, ‘We want to do this,’” Browne said. “People generally felt a need and wanted someone to do it for them. And then the travel industry — well, some agencies, anyway — saw that there was a need for it. And that’s when it really took off.”

Unlike some expats who live in Paris year-round, Browne still travels between Paris and Canada. She has trained staff to run tours while she is out of the country.

“I was doing the administration and all that, and the guides were my guides. And that was interesting because I was able to pass on that training and knowledge to other people I knew among black Americans,” Browne said. “It wasn’t just me anymore, it was other people kind of putting it off. That was good, too. In that sense, it wasn’t bad.”

When Browne moved to Paris, she absorbed the culture and loved it.

“In those first years, and since I used to be here full time — raising kids, living the life of a wife, being part of a French family, having friends, teaching, working — I felt increasingly connected to the place I used to be living. I felt good about being part of this society. I liked being French. That was what I identified with greater than being Canadian.

“I feel like I’m more myself here. I feel like I’ve definitely found my mission and my reason for being here in a way that I don’t feel when I’m back in North America.”

On the other hand, Browne said she also cherishes her Canadian roots and, greater than anything, enjoys having the ability to come back and are available back. “It allows me to relax into one. And then when I get bored of that, I can relax into the other,” Browne said. “I just can’t imagine being just one.”

While Paris has been a place of comfort for generations, Browne, like others, is at pains to emphasize that Paris will not be a paradise for black Americans.

“I don’t think it’s a panacea. Nothing is a panacea. But there are times when you need a break and there are places where you can take a break, where you don’t have to think, where you don’t have to feel oppressed, where you can hide,” she said.

“You start to calm down, you start to relax. And then you find other parts of yourself that you can bring out, like the writers did. They found a certain space where they could create. And then you take a breath, and then you throw yourself back into the fight if you need to, or you find a place to fight, or something to fight for. You choose that, but at least you get a chance to sit out a few rounds, right?”