Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

  JOHN HOWARD GRIFFIN MANSFIELD, TEXAS

  Sex: Male

  Height: 6’1 1/2”

  Weight: 196

  Hair: Brown

  Race: White

  Would he think I had merely stolen the papers from some white man?

  “What do you keep walking for when I told you to stop, dad?”

  I knew I should never get away from the bully unless I bluffed. I had long ago been trained in judo. Perhaps if I were lucky enough to get in the first blow, I might have a chance. I saw an alleyway in the dim light and summoned a deep growl.

  “You come on, boy,” I said without looking back.

  “You follow me, boy. I’m heading into that alley down there.”

  We walked on.

  “That’s right, boy,” I said. “Now you’re doing just like I want you to.”

  I approached the alley entrance. “I’m going in, boy. You follow me.”

  “I don’t dig you, daddy.”

  “You follow me boy, ‘cause I’m just aching to feed you a fistful of brass knucks right in that big mouth of yours.” I fairly shouted the last words.

  I stepped into the alley and pressed against the wall, sick with fright. The stench of garbage and urine surrounded me. High above the buildings’ black silhouette stars shone in a clear sky. I listened for his footsteps, ready to bolt if he accepted the challenge.

  “Blessed St. Jude,” I heard myself whisper, “send the bastard away,” and I wondered from what source within me the prayer had spontaneously sprung.

  After what seemed a long time, I stuck my head around the alley corner and looked back along the street. It stretched empty to the streetlamp at the end.

  I hurried to Dryades and along it to the well-lighted steps of the Catholic church I had visited in the afternoon. Sitting on the bottom step, I rested my head on my crossed arms and waited for my nerves to settle to calm. A great bell from the tower slowly rolled eight o’clock. I listened as the metallic clangor rolled away over the rooftops of the quarter.

  The word “nigger” picked up the bell’s resonances and repeated itself again and again in my brain.

  Hey, nigger, you can’t go in there.

  Hey, nigger, you can’t drink here.

  We don’t serve niggers.

  And then the boy’s words: Mr. No-Hair, Baldy, Shit-head. (Would it have happened if I were white?)

  And then the doctor’s words as I left his office yesterday: Now you go into oblivion.

  Seated on the church steps tonight, I wondered if he could have known how truly he spoke, how total the feeling of oblivion was.

  A police car cruised past, slowed. The plaster-white face of an officers peered toward me. We stared at one another as the car took a right turn and disappeared behind the decrepit rectory of the church. I felt certain the police would circle the block and check on me. The cement was suddenly hard to my seat. I rose and hurried toward a little Negro café in the next block.

  As I stepped through the door, the Negro woman sang out: “All we got left’s beans and rice, honey.”

  “That’s fine. Bring me a big plate,” I said, sinking into a chair.

  “How about some beer?”

  “No … you got any milk?”

  “Don’t you like beer, honey?”

  “I like it, but I’ve got diabetes.”

  “Oh … Say, I’ve got a couple of pig tails left. You want me to put them in with the beans?”

  “Please.”

  She carried the platter to my table and fetched my milk. Though Negroes apparently live on beans and rice in this area, it is no handicap. They are delicious and nourishing. I tried to eat the pig tails, but like chicken necks, they are mostly bone and little meat.

  Later, in my room, I undressed for bed. The game still went noisily at the Y next door. Though the large house was still, I heard the TV from Mrs. Davis’s room somewhere on the other side.

  The whites seemed far away, out there in their parts of the city. The distance between them and me was far more than the miles that physically separated us. It was an area of unknowing. I wondered if it could really be bridged.

  November 10-12

  Two days of incessant walking, mostly looking for jobs. I wanted to discover what sort of work an educated Negro, nicely dressed, could find. I met no rebuffs, only gentleness when they informed me they could not use my services as typist, bookkeeper, etc.

  The patterns became the same. Each day at the shine stand we had the same kind of customers; each day we cooked food and ate on the sidewalk; each day we fed the beggar and the pigeons.

  The widow woman dropped by both days. I gently let her know that I was married. Sterling said she asked him about me, proposing to invite me to her house for Sunday dinner. I stayed at the stand less and less.

  Among Negroes I was treated with the most incredible courtesies, even by strangers.

  One night I decided to go to a Negro movie house. I walked up Dryades and asked a young man if he could tell me the way.

  “If you’ll wait just a minute, I’ll show you the way,” he said.

  I stood on the corner and in a moment he returned.

  We began walking. He was a first-year student at Dillard University, hoping to become a sociologist, to “do something for our people.” The walk appeared to be endless. We must have gone at least two miles when I asked: “Do you live over in this direction?”

  “No, I live back there where you saw me.”

  “But this is taking you way out of your way.”

  “I don’t mind. I enjoy the talk.”

  When we reached the movie, he asked, “Do you think you can find the way back?”

  “Oh, yes … I won’t have any trouble.”

  “If you aren’t sure, I can find out what time the feature ends and come back for you.”

  Stupefied that he would walk these miles as a courtesy to a stranger, I suggested he let me buy him a ticket for the show and we could walk back together.

  “No, thanks - I have to get some studying done. But I’ll be glad to come back for you.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it. At least let me pay you something. This has been a great favor.”

  He refused the money.

  The next morning I went to the Y café next door for a breakfast of grits and eggs. The elderly gentleman who ran the café soon had me talking - or rather listening. He foresaw a new day for the race. Great strides had been made, but greater ones were to be made still. I told him of my unsuccessful job-hunting. He said it was all part of the pattern of economics - economic injustice.

  “You take a young white boy. He can go through school and college with a real incentive. He knows he can make good money in any profession when he gets out. But can a Negro - in the South? No, I’ve seen many make brilliant grades in college. And yet when they come home in the summers to earn a little money, they have to do the most menial work. And even when they graduate it’s a long hard pull. Most take postal jobs, or preaching and teaching jobs. This is the cream. What about the others, Mr. Griffin? A man knows no matter how hard he works, he’s never going to quite manage … taxes and prices eat up more than he can earn. He can’t see how he’ll ever have a wife and children. The economic structure just doesn’t permit it unless he’s prepared to live down in poverty and have his wife work too. That’s part of it. Our people aren’t educated because they either can’t afford it or else they know education won’t earn the jobs it would a white man. Any kind of family life, any decent standard of living seems impossible from the outset. So a lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can - mostly in pleasure, and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what have they got to lose if they do die in a car wreck or a knife fight or something else equally stupid?”

  “Yes, and then it’s these things that cause the whites to say we’re not worthy of first-class citizenship.”

  “Ah …” He dropped his hands to his sides hard in f
rustration. “Isn’t it so? They make it impossible for us to earn, to pay much in taxes because we haven’t much in income, and then they say that because they pay most of the taxes, they have the right to have things like they want. It’s a vicious circle, Mr. Griffin, and I don’t know how we’ll get out of it. They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can’t deserve our rights.”

  Others entered, ordered breakfast, joined the conversation.

  “Equal job opportunities,” Mr. Gayle said. “That’s the answer to much of the tragedy of our young people.”

  “What’s needed?” I asked. “What kind of wisdom can overcome the immense propaganda of the racists and the hate groups? People read this poison - and it’s often presented in a benevolent tone, even a kind tone. Many sincerely think the Negro, because of his very Negro-ness, could not possibly measure up to white standards in work performance. I read recently where one of them said that equality of education and job opportunity would be an even greater tragedy for us. He said it would quickly prove to us that we can’t measure up - disillusion us by showing us that we are, in fact, inferior.”

  “I wish those kind souls wouldn’t be so protective. I know plenty who’d be willing to take the chance of being ‘disillusioned,’ ” the proprietor laughed.

  “They’re about fifty years behind the times,” an elderly man said. “The social scientists have shown this is wrong. Our own people have proven themselves in every field - not just a few, but thousands. How can the racists deny these proofs?”

  “They don’t bother to find out about them,” Mr. Gayle said flatly.

  “We need a conversion of morals,” the elderly man said. “Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint - some enlightened common sense. Otherwise, we’ll never have the right answers when the pressure groups - those racists, super-patriots, whatever you want to call them - tag every move toward racial justice as communist-inspired, Zionist-inspired, Illuminati-inspired, Satan-inspired … part of some secret conspiracy to overthrow the Christian civilization.”

  “So, if you want to be a good Christian, you mustn’t act like one. That makes sense,” Mr. Gayle said.

  “That’s what they claim. The minute you give me my rights to vote when I pay taxes, to have a decent job, a decent home, a decent education - then you’re taking the first step toward ‘race-mixing’ and that’s part of the great secret conspiracy to ruin civilization - to ruin America,” the elderly man said.

  “So, if you want to be a good American, you’ve got to practice bad Americanism. That makes sense, too,” Mr. Gayle sighed. “Maybe it’d take a saint after all to straighten such a mess out.”

  “We’ve reached a poor state when people are afraid that doing the decent and right thing is going to help the communist conspiracy,” the proprietor said. “I’m sure a lot of people are held back just on that point.”

  “Any way you look at it, we’re in the middle,” concluded the elderly man. “It’s hard for me to understand how letting me have a decent job, so I can raise my children in a better home and give them a better education is going to help the enemies of my country. …”

  Walking along Dryades, through the ghetto, I realized that every informed man with whom I had spoken, in the intimate freedom of the colored bond, had acknowledged a double problem for the Negro. First, the discrimination against him. Second, and almost more grievous, his discrimination against himself; his contempt for the blackness that he associates with his suffering; his willingness to sabotage his fellow Negroes because they are part of the blackness he has found so painful.

  “Want something, mister?” a white merchant said as I passed. I glanced at him sitting in the doorway of his junky store. “Come on in,” he wheedled, sounding for the world as though he were pimping for the shoes he had on display.

  I had not gone ten feet when I heard him solicit someone else in the same tone. “Want something, mister?”

  “Yeah, but you ain’t my type,” the man behind me answered without humor.

  On Chartres Street in the French Quarter, I walked toward Brennan’s, one of New Orleans’ famed restaurants. Forgetting myself for a moment, I stopped to study the menu that was elegantly exposed in a show window. I read, realizing that a few days earlier I could have gone in and ordered anything on the menu. But now, though I was the same person with the same appetite, the same appreciation and even the same wallet, no power on earth could get me inside this place for a meal. I recalled hearing some Negro say, “You can live here all your life, but you’ll never get inside one of the great restaurants except as a kitchen boy.” The Negro often dreams of things separated from him only by a door, knowing that he is forever cut off from experiencing them.

  I read the menu carefully, forgetting that Negroes do not do such things. It is too poignant, like the little boy peering in the candy store window. It might affect the tourist.

  I looked up to see the frowns of disapproval that can speak so plainly and so loudly without words. The Negro learns this silent language fluently. He knows by the white man’s look of disapproval and petulance that he is being told to get on his way, that he is “stepping out of line.”

  It was a day of giving the gracious smile and receiving the gracious rebuff as I asked again and again about jobs.

  Finally, I gave up and went to the shine stand. From there I set out to return at dusk to Dryades. But I had walked too far. My legs gave out. At Jackson Square, a public park, I found a long, curving bench and sat down to rest for a moment. The park appeared deserted. A movement through the bushes attracted my attention. I looked to see a middle-aged white man across the park slowly fold the newspaper he was reading, get to his feet and amble toward me. The fragrance of his pipe tobacco preceded him, reassuring me. Racists are not the pipe-smoking type, I thought to myself.

  With perfect courtesy he said, “You’d better find yourself someplace else to rest.”

  I took it as a favor. He was warning me so I could get out before someone insulted me. “Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t know we weren’t allowed in here.”

  Later, I told the story at the Y, and discovered that Negroes have the right to sit in Jackson Square. This individual simply did not want me there.

  But at the time I did not know it. I left, sick with exhaustion, wondering where a Negro could sit to rest. It was walk constantly until you could catch a bus, but keep on the move unless you have business somewhere. If you stop to sit on the curb, a police car will pass and probably ask you what you’re doing. I have heard none of the Negroes speak of police harassment, but they have warned me that any time the police see a Negro idling, especially one they do not recognize, they will surely question him. This is worrisome, certainly an experience any Negro wants to avoid.

  I walked over to Claiborne and caught the first bus that passed. It took me out to Dillard University, a beautiful campus. I was too tired to explore it, however, and sat on the bench waiting to catch another bus into town. Buses were inexpensive to ride and it was a good way to rest.

  Night was near when I finally caught the bus going toward town. Two blocks before Canal, the bus makes a left turn off Claiborne. I rang the bell to get off at this stop. The driver pulled to a halt and opened the door. He left it open until I reached it. I was ready to step off when the door banged shut in my face. Since he had to remain there waiting for a clear passage through traffic, I asked him to let me off.

  “I can’t leave the door open all night,” he said impatiently.

  He waited another full minute, but refused to open the door.

  “Will you please let me off at the next corner then?” I asked, controlling my temper, careful not to do or say anything that would jeopardize the Negroes’ position in the area.

  He did not answer. I returned to my seat. A woman watched me with sympathetic anger, as though she in no way approved of this kind of treatment. However, she did not speak.

  A
t each stop, I sounded the buzzer, but the driver continued through the next two stops. He drove me eight full blocks past my original stop and pulled up then only because some white passengers wanted to get off. I followed them to the front. He watched me, his hand on the lever that would spring the doors shut.

  “May I get off now?” I asked quietly when the others had stepped down.

  “Yeah, go ahead,” he said finally, as though he had tired of the cat-and-mouse game. I got off, sick, wondering how I could ever walk those eight blocks back to my original stop.

  In all fairness, I must add that this is the only example of deliberate cruelty I encountered on any of the city buses of New Orleans. Even though I was outraged, I knew he did not commit this indignity against me, but against my black flesh, my color. This was an individual act by an individual, and certainly not typical.

  November 14 Mississippi

  After a week of wearying rejection, the newness had worn off. My first vague, favorable impression that it was not as bad as I had thought it would be came from courtesies of the whites toward the Negro in New Orleans. But this was superficial. All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy - that the Negro is treated not even as a second-class citizen, but as a tenth-class one. His day-to-day living is a reminder of his inferior status. He does not become calloused to these things - the polite rebuffs when he seeks better employment; hearing himself referred to as nigger, coon, jigaboo; having to bypass available rest-room facilities or eating facilities to find one specified for him. Each new reminder strikes at the raw spot, deepens the wound. I do not speak here only from my personal reaction, but from seeing it happen to others, and from seeing their reactions.