PARIS— Who comes to Paris for a moral lesson? Not me. But that's how it turned out.

It turned out I got to meet Patricia Eakins, a New Yorker on a book tour here.

She was reading excerpts from her latest novel for a couple of dozen fans gathered in the loft of the Village Voice, a favorite bookshop for Americans in Paris.

Better had she excerpted the title. Hold on while I quote it in full:

"The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste
"Father and Mother
"First and Last
"Including:
"The Tribulations of Bondage in the Sugar Isles
"Pierre's Escape from Certain Harm to His Person
"How He Was Marooned
"His Friends & Religion
"His True Wife & Fishy Consorts
"His Children, Born from His Mouth like Words
"Physics and Metaphysics
"Cyclopedish Histoire
"Flora, Fauna, & Mysteriosi
"Revenge and Devotion
"Divinations
"Commonplace Book
"Being a True Account of the Life and Times of an African Man of Letters,
"A Son of Guinée Born into Bondage,
"Whose Ambitions Were Realized in STRANGE AND UNEXPECTED WAYS,
"Yet Who Made His PEACE with Several Gods
"and Established A REALM of Equality & Freedom & Bounty,
"in Which No Creature Lives from Another's Labor.
"We're a Little Late, Folks, So Good Night."

Scratch that last line. That was just me trying to catch my breath.

Indeed, the novel is breathtaking, created from the pen of a white woman who grew up in the Sixties, writing eloquently as if from the heart and soul, and from inside the skin, of a black man in the 18th century.

Never mind that some critics may characterize her presumption to do so as ... uppity?

"In my own experience," she told her audience at the Village Voice, "people of color have been less worried about this than politically correct people with no color."

Patricia Eakins, who speaks as eloquently as she writes, may appear white, but "I don't feel altogether white," she said.

She goes to explain that her first husband was an African-American, whom she married in her early twenties. It was an experience that drastically altered the world she lives in.

"Simple things like suddenly noticing that at midnight if I stepped out in the street and hailed a cab, one would come. If he stepped out into the street and hailed a cab ... " Her voice wavered. Even now it's hard for her talk about it ... "one would not come."

So it is that she doesn't trust that feeling of privilege, which is central, she said, "to what we call whiteness.

"I don't think whiteness is just a gradation of skin color. What we mean when we say whiteness is a whole structure of privilege. I do not accept the thought of myself as being the bearer of this privilege."

At the same time, she doesn't deny that it would be most difficult to move away from it.

"You don't just make one little moral gesture in your life, and you're suddenly no longer white."

The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, which took her ten years to produce, is hardly one little gesture.

For her, it was an encounter with the structures "of colonialism, of racism, of whiteness.

"Privilege is very attractive. The people in the big house have the nice clothes, they have the fancy parties, .... It took me a while to stop identifying with privilege. It is very hard."

For those who want to try, The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste ($19.95, New York University Press) is an easy first step — a quick read once you get past the title.

© 1999 Cox News Service