November 30, 2002

By FRANK BRUNI

THENS — Over the two decades since Yvette Jarvis came here from the United States, she has been called many things.

"The Black Diamond" was a nickname that Greeks bestowed on her when she was playing women's basketball here and becoming an immediate standout in a country that was almost entirely ethnically and racially homogenous at the time.

"The Black Aphrodite" was her tag when she was modeling clothing and cosmetics and getting a toehold in Greek show business that led to a television role in a situation comedy as the manager of a strip club.

But in January, Athenians will be calling her something new: city councilwoman. Ms. Jarvis, 44, was elected last month, becoming the first black person, and one of the few foreign-born Greek citizens, to win public office here.

"I'm a front-runner, no question about it," she said late one recent afternoon as she surveyed the setup at an Athens supper club where she would soon perform her singing act, a repertory of American jazz and pop standards that represents yet another chapter in her cross-cultural odyssey.

"That's me: multifaceted, lots of interests, lots of loves, lots of passions," she said. Her voice was blunt and her self-appraisal as immodest as the gumdrop-sized diamond ring that caught the light whenever she gesticulated, which was constantly.

She noticed her interviewer staring at the jewel, then smiled and shrugged.

"A girl's got to have presents, doesn't she?" she said.

Ms. Jarvis, who has Greek citizenship through marriage, campaigned on a platform of making Greece a more hospitable place for immigrants, who only recently have begun pouring into the country and now represent about a million of the roughly 11 million people here. Because of that, her election has occasionally been cast as a sign of changing times, an example of a tradition-bound society moving beyond its insularity.

"The concept was that there are many people in Greece who are not of Greek nationality but are a part of Athenian society and have not been represented until now," said Kriton Vassilikopoulos, an operative in the liberal party that recruited Ms. Jarvis to run.

But there were enough candidates vying for 41 seats that it took only about 5,100 votes for Ms. Jarvis to win hers. Her victory may ultimately have less to do with demographic trends than with time's ability, in her particular case, to transform an exotic rarity into an everyday reality.

"I don't think people here even see Yvette as a color anymore," said her second and current husband, John R. Muller, a professional dog trainer and, like her, a transplanted American. "They just see her as a straightforward spirit who does many things."

She got her gumption from her upbringing, which taught her not to be daunted by strange or difficult circumstances and never to assume that anything was beyond reach.

Her mother died when she was just 9, and she and her four younger siblings went to live with their grandmother in a two-bedroom apartment in a housing project in Brooklyn. Although welfare and Social Security were the main sources of income, there was somehow money for skating at Rockefeller Center and stacks of presents at Christmas.

"To this day, it's a mystery to me how she did it," Ms. Jarvis said of her grandmother. "But there's this wisdom that they say older ladies have about how to stretch a dollar."

Nudged by her grandmother, she excelled in the classroom and on the basketball court. She won a full scholarship to Boston University, where she majored in psychology and set her sights on Harvard Law School.

She said she had been accepted there when a chance encounter in a Boston disco changed everything.

"He was gorgeous," she said. "Gorgeous. 6-foot-5, muscled, black curly hair, olive skin." He was also from Greece, where she moved in 1982. The couple married the following year.

He had a basketball career, and soon she did, too. Lean, 5-foot-10 and striking, she also began to model, and she found herself being fussed over in the newspapers and recognized on the street.

Her color, she said, never seemed to block her way. If anything, it gave her a distinctive calling card, drawing the eyes of Greeks who had seen too few people like her to feel much beyond curiosity. She said that the nicknames she acquired — "The Black Gazelle" was another one — were never meant to be disparaging or dismissive.

"These were all beautiful things to say," she said. "In the States, there's a whole different history to all of this."

That first marriage did not last, ending after seven years. But her local celebrity endured. As she became fluent in Greek, she did more and more television: the situation comedy; a talk show devoted to popular entertainment; commercials, including one for a furniture store that ended with her saying, in Greek, "Listen to Yvette."

Then there was the singing, which began as a kind of lark, with Tina Turner impersonations — little dress, big hair — in dance clubs. Later she mimed Madonna and Janet Jackson, perfecting a bump and grind.

"I just could carry a tune and gave a very good show, because I'm self-confident," Ms. Jarvis explained.

Finally, there was politics, or at least a string of causes that drew her to rallies and meetings of advocacy groups.

Still a magnet for television cameras, not because of her race but because people had indeed learned to listen to Yvette, she used the exposure to speak out for women's rights and especially for immigrants' rights. She could see that the desperate people who came to Greece from poor, war-torn countries over the past decade were being met with more suspicion than she, an oddity from the United States, ever was.

Every so often, she said, she did come face-to-face with racism, although the encounters sometimes verged on the comical. She recalled that on the campaign trail one day, an elderly woman shouted, "I've been in your country! I know what Puerto Ricans are like!" Ms. Jarvis's reaction was laughter.

But being black, she said, has been an essential part of her journey: she reconciled herself early on to being different and learned to feel bold rather than abashed about it.

She and Mr. Muller, who is white, have a 7-year-old son, John Jacob Shaquille. Although they are rearing him in a hillside house on the posh northern periphery of Athens, Ms. Jarvis makes him read about Jackie Robinson, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and similar figures from a different place and time.

"He has to know about these things," she said early one evening as she shooed him out of the family living room, admonishing him, in a combination of English and Greek, to do his homework. "He has to know how to go home.

"And he does," she added. "He's like me — a chameleon."

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