The Algerians, to Simeon’s disappointment, do not “break into smiles and rush to embrace him shouting: ‘Brother!’ They kept their distance, considering him with caution, as they would a Frenchman—or an American.” In “The Stone Face,” whiteness is not a “racial” trait; it is, rather, a synonym for situational privilege. Relinquishing it, Gardner Smith suggests, is a difficult process, especially for an oppressed man who’s barely begun to enjoy it. In a pivotal scene, Simeon brings his Algerian friends to a private club that he could never have joined in America. People at other tables whisper as they enter; the host is chillier than usual. “To his own astonishment, Simeon felt uneasy. Why was that?” Perhaps “he was afraid of something. Of losing something. Acceptance, perhaps. The word made him wince. Of feeling humiliation again.” An argument erupts between a white woman and one of Simeon’s friends, but Simeon, shamed by his initial response, rallies to his friend’s defense, and feels, for the first time, “at one with the Algerians. He felt strangely free—the wheel had turned full circle.”

Simeon’s black friends at the Tournon frown upon his decision to disavow his privilege: they have no desire to place their security in France in jeopardy—or to be associated with a group despised by their hosts. Maria is even more alarmed by Simeon’s deepening attachment to his Algerian friends, one of whom—to Simeon’s horror—has expressed a violent suspicion of Jews. Why, she asks, can’t he “simply accept happiness” instead of “seeking complications”?

As Simeon is taken into the confidence of his Algerian friends, he learns of the existence of detention centers and camps inside France, and of a network of French supporters for the resistance. In the last pages of the novel, Gardner Smith provides a wrenching account of a police massacre of Algerian protesters that took place on October 17, 1961—the only one that exists in the fiction of the period. (The first French novel to broach the topic, Didier Daeninckx’s “Meurtres pour mémoire,” was published in 1984.) Gardner Smith’s French publisher told him it was “very courageous to have written the book, but we can’t publish it in France.” Unlike his other books, “The Stone Face,” his only novel set in Paris, has never been translated into French.

“The Stone Face” ends with Simeon deciding that it’s time to go home, where civil-rights activists are “fighting a battle harder than that of any guerrillas in any burnt mountains. Fighting the stone face.” Some admirers of the novel have interpreted its conclusion as a failure of nerve, a retreat from the cosmopolitan solidarity it otherwise promotes. The cultural critic Paul Gilroy called the end of the novel a “capitulation to the demands of a narrow version of cultural kinship that Smith’s universalizing argument appeared to have transcended.” But Simeon’s decision could also be read as evidence of a more internationalist understanding of race and empire. When Simeon refers to black Americans, he now calls them “America’s Algerians.”

The first draft of Gardner Smith’s book ended with Simeon heading to Africa. Gardner Smith did the same, leaving his job at A.F.P. and going to Ghana, where W. E. B. Du Bois’s widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, had invited him to help her launch the independent state’s first television station. He flew to Accra in August, 1964, with Solange and their one-year-old daughter, Michele, and moved into a big house on the sea provided by Kwame Nkrumah’s government.

“For the first time in a long time I feel very useful!” he wrote his mother shortly after his arrival. “This country is going places—Nkrumah is a real African patriot, and he wants his country to develop fast. The people walk proud and tall.” He met other prominent African-American writers living in Accra, including Maya Angelou and Julian Mayfield, and spent an evening talking to Malcolm X when Malcolm swept into town in November, three months before his assassination. In those early days, Gardner Smith allowed himself to dream that he’d come back home. Sounding not unlike Simeon Brown among the Algerians of northern Paris, he wrote that on the boulevards of Accra he “felt, sometimes, as though I were walking down a street in South Philadelphia, Harlem, or Chicago. These black people in their multicolored robes, with their laughter, with their rhythmic gait, were my cousins.” In July, 1965, he affirmed his bond with the African motherland when Solange gave birth to their son, Claude.

Gardner Smith’s African dream, however, disintegrated even more rapidly than his Paris reverie. While the “visible signs of black sovereignty” in Nkrumah’s Ghana still moved him, he realized that “the idea of black American nationalists, summed up in the phrase, ‘We are black, therefore we are brothers,’ is incomprehensible in tribal societies where the hereditary enemies have, precisely, been black. For the Ibo of Eastern Nigeria, the Hausa of the North is a much more fearful, deadly and real adversary than the white-skinned men across the sea he will never sail.” Early in the morning of February 24, 1966, he and Solange were awakened by gunfire. The army and the police had staged a coup against Nkrumah. When Gardner Smith arrived at his office, he was detained by a group of armed men, and taken to a rebel-controlled police station. He and his family flew to Geneva soon after with all their belongings, before making their way home to Paris.

Not long after their return, Gardner Smith separated from Solange. He had fallen in love with a young Indian-Jewish woman working at the Indian Embassy, Ira Reubner, the daughter of a judge on the high court of Patna; they married as soon as his divorce was finalized. (Their daughter, Rachel, now a singer and actress, was born in 1971.) Restless as ever, he continued to travel for A.F.P. In the summer of 1967, he spent three weeks in Algeria and a month in the United States, where he saw his mother for the first time in sixteen years. This reporting became the basis of his book “Return to Black America” (1970), a fascinating study of the transformations among “America’s Algerians.” He interviewed the Black Power leaders Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, and Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Nation of Islam; he also met with young gang members, and Ellsworth (Bumpy) Johnson, the king of the Harlem underworld, who reminded him of Ali La Pointe, an Algerian rebel who started out as a criminal in the casbah. Youth gangs, Gardner Smith wrote, were “becoming the hard core of the black nationalist movement. . . . The same thing . . . occurred with Algerian gangs . . . during the Algerian liberation struggle.” He marvelled at the confidence exhibited by young black people, their fearlessness in confronting white supremacy, even “the way they moved, the way they acted.” But “the real change, the real revolution, was inside,” he wrote. “These black youths with whom I talked from coast to coast were much more different from most people of my generation than we were from the generation of our fathers.”

What had triggered this cultural revolution among young black Americans, he argued, was the Second World War, when black soldiers like himself were “uprooted from their tenant farms and ghettos and hurled across an ocean to do battle with white and yellow men in the name of freedom, democracy, and equality. The war opened up new horizons. Many black Americans came alive for the first time in the ruins of Berlin, the coffeehouses of Tokyo, the homes of Frenchmen or Italians. Members of a victorious army, they found respect and consideration for the first time—but from the former enemy!”

The activists in the Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Power movement, as Gardner Smith saw it, were the spiritual children of these men. Black America’s revolution, he suggested, had been fuelled not only by oppression but by the enlarged perspective and imaginative freedom that displacement and exile had afforded. The awakening that Simeon Brown undergoes as an exile in Paris had become the experience of an entire generation of young African-Americans. Nothing less than a “radical transformation of the surrounding white society itself,” Gardner Smith concluded, could answer the revolution’s demands for equality “in every sphere—political, economic, social, and psychological.” Like Baldwin, who drew a similar portrait of the Black Power era in “No Name in the Street,” from 1972, he predicted that white America would do everything in its power to resist such a transformation. Gardner Smith never returned to the States. Until his death, in 1974, Paris remained his home. He described himself as a “man without a country,” yet he embraced his exile—an exile without illusions.