PARIS — Makingson Delivrance Mespoulous runs his fingers along a worn-smooth column holding up the roof of the Notre Dame Cathedral that has presided in Gothic splendor over Paris for eight centuries, his face dusted white from stone shavings.
The 34-year-old stone carver has spent the last 11 years restoring the stained-black arches and nose-less gargoyles of some of France's favorite, but crumbling, monuments. But Mespoulous has spent his entire life carving his way through something else: the barricades created by France's ethnic divide.
Born in Haiti and adopted by a French family when he was 3, Mespoulous knows that his black skin is uncommon among the craftsmen who preserve this nation's architectural heritage. While he was perched on wind-swept scaffolds, some co-workers had tried to keep his story outside the walls of French history.
"They told me these monuments were not built for me, but for the French. They told me to go home," he says, able to smile about it now because such blows were rare enough and because after years of back-twisting labor beside fellow artisans, he believes that most are a second family.
This soft-spoken man proved he had the ferocious but controlled energy needed to dig into a gigantic slab of stone at the painstakingly slow rhythm the material demands. Others noticed, and despite his different background, Mespoulous was quickly given the responsibility of overseeing crucial restoration sites in his "village of old stones," Paris.
"There are not many black stone carvers," Mespoulous says. "And yet," he says, speaking of employers, "they come to me, to ask me where I want to work, what I want to do. They let me do whatever I want."
As he passes monuments covered like badly wrapped presents for reconstruction, Mespoulous repeatedly calls out to friends working behind the plastic curtains. "Eventually, everyone gets along," he says with a smile.
Carving an entry into France's past gave Mespoulous a tangible link to a country he didn't easily fit into as the only child of color in a small village 1 1/2 hours' drive north of Paris, where he began sculpting rocks from abandoned quarries. Though he was surrounded by a loving family, Mespoulous says he lacked confidence, and adds, "I was a black boy in a white country. No matter what I did, I was different."
