Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

  “The sonsofbitches beat one boy to a pulp. He was alone on a stretch of walk. They jumped out of the car, tore him up and were gone before anyone knew what was happening,” he said. “They framed another on a trumped-up charge of carrying whiskey in his car. He’s one of the finest boys in town. Never drinks.”

  His bitterness was so great I knew I would be thought a spy for the whites if I divulged my identity.

  Another car roared down the street, and the street was suddenly deserted, but the Negroes appeared again shortly. I sought refuge in a Negro drugstore and drank milk shakes as an excuse to stay there.

  A well-dressed man approached and asked if I were Mr. Griffin. I told him I was. He said there was a room for me and I could go to it whenever I got ready.

  I walked through the street again, through the darkness that was alive with lights and humanity. Blues boomed from a tavern across the street. It was a sort of infernal circus, smelling of barbecue and kerosene.

  My room was upstairs in a wooden shanty structure that had never known paint. It was decrepit, but the Negro leaders assured me it was safe and that they would keep a close watch on me. Without turning on my light, I went over and sat on the bed. Lights from the street cast a yellowish glow over the room.

  From the tavern below a man improvised a ballad about “poor Mack Parker … overcome with passion … his body in the creek.”

  “Oh Lord,” a woman said in the quiet that followed, her voice full of sadness and awe.

  “Lordy … Lordy …” a man said in a hushed voice, as though there were nothing more he could say.

  Canned jazz blared through the street with a monstrous high-strutting rhythm that pulled at the viscera. The board floor squeaked under my footsteps. I switched on the light and looked into a cracked piece of mirror bradded with bent nails to the wall. The bald Negro stared back at me from its mottled sheen. I knew I was in hell. Hell could be no more lonely or hopeless, no more agonizingly estranged from the world of order and harmony.

  I heard my voice, as though it belonged to someone else, hollow in the empty room, detached, say: “Nigger, what you standing up there crying for?”

  I saw tears slick on his cheeks in the yellow light.

  Then I heard myself say what I have heard them say so many times. “It’s not right. It’s just not right.”

  Then the onrush of revulsion, the momentary flash of blind hatred against the whites who were somehow responsible for all of this, the old bewilderment of wondering, “Why do they do it? Why do they keep us like this? What are they gaining? What evil has taken them?” (The Negroes say, “What sickness has taken them?”) My revulsion turned to grief that my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men’s souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock.

  I turned away from the mirror. A burned-out light globe lay on the plank floor in the corner. Its unfrosted glass held the reflection of the overhead bulb, a speck of brightness. A half-dozen film negatives curled up around it like dead leaves. I picked them up and held them before the light with strange excitement, curious to see the image that some prior occupant of this room had photographed.

  Each negative was blank.

  I imagined him going to the drugstore to pick up the package of photos and hurrying to this squalid room to warm himself with the view of his wife, his children, his parents, his girlfriend - who knows? He had sat here holding blank negatives, masterpieces of human ingenuity wasted.

  I flicked the negatives, as he must have done, toward the corner, heard them scratch dryly against the wall and flap to the floor. One struck the dead globe, causing it to sing its strange filamental music of the spheres, fragile and high-pitched above the outside noises.

  Music from the jukebox, a grinding rhythm, ricocheted down the street.

  hangity

  hangity hangity oomp

  Harangity oomp oomp oomp oomp oomp oomp oomp

  The aroma of barbecue tormented my empty insides, but I did not want to leave the room and go back into the mainstream of hell.

  I took out my notebook, lay across the bed on my stomach and attempted to write - anything to escape the death dance out there in the Mississippi night. But the intimate contentment would not come. I tried to write to my wife - I needed to write her, to give her my news - but I found I could tell her nothing. No words would come. She had nothing to do with this life, nothing to do with the room in Hattiesburg or with its Negro inhabitant. It was maddening. All my instincts struggled against the estrangement. I began to understand Lionel Trilling’s remark that culture - learned behavior patterns so deeply ingrained they produce involuntary reactions - is a prison. My conditioning as a Negro and the immense sexual implications with which the racists in our culture bombard us, cut me off, even in my most intimate self, from any connection with my wife.

  I stared at the letter and saw written: Hattiesburg, November 14. My darling, followed by a blank page.

  The visual barrier imposed itself. The observing self saw the Negro, surrounded by the sounds and smells of the ghetto, write “Darling” to a white woman. The chains of my blackness would not allow me to go on. Though I understood and could analyze what was happening, I could not break through:

  Never look at a white woman - look down or the other way.

  What do you mean, calling a white woman “darling” like that, boy?

  I went out to find some barbecue, down the outside steps, my hand on the cool weathered railing, past a man leaning forward with his head cushioned on his arm against a wall, leaking into the shadows; and on into a door somewhere. There were dim lights and signs: NO OBSENETY ALLOWED and HOT LINKS 25¢.

  A round-faced woman, her cheeks slicked yellow with sweat, handed me a barbecued beef sandwich. My black hands took it from her black hands. The imprint of her thumb remained in the bread’s soft pores. Standing so close, odors of her body rose up to me from her white uniform, a mingling of hickory-smoked flesh, gardenia talcum and sweat. The expression on her full face cut into me. Her eyes said with unmistakable clarity, “God … isn’t it awful?” She took the money and stepped back into the open kitchen. I watched her lift the giant lid of the pit and fork out a great chunk of meat. White smoke billowed up, hazing her face to gray.

  The meat warmed through the bread in my hand. I carried the sandwich outside and sat on the back steps leading up to my room to eat it. A streak of light from the front flowed past me, illuminating dusty weeds, debris and out buildings some distance to the rear. The night, the hoots and shouts surrounded me even in this semi-hiding place.

  hangity

  hangity hangity

  Harangity …

  The music consumed in its blatant rhythm all other rhythms, even that of the heartbeat. I wondered how all this would look to the casual observer, or to the whites in their homes. “The niggers are whooping it up over on Mobile Street tonight,” they might say. “They’re happy.” Or, as one scholar put it, “Despite their lowly status, they are capable of living jubilantly.” Would they see the immense melancholy that hung over the quarter, so oppressive that men had to dull their sensibilities in noise or wine or sex or gluttony in order to escape it? The laughter had to be gross or it would turn to sobs, and to sob would be to realize, and to realize would be to despair. So the noise poured forth like a jazzed-up fugue, louder and louder to cover the whisper in every man’s soul. “You are black. You are condemned.” This is what the white man mistook for “jubilant living” and called “whooping it up.” This is how the white man can say, “They live like dogs,” never realizing why they must, to save themselves, shout, get drunk, shake the hip, pour pleasures into bellies deprived of happiness. Otherwise, the sounds from the quarter would lose order and rhythm and become wails.

  I felt disaster. Somewhere in the night’s future the tensions would explode into violence. The white boys would race through too fast. They would see a man or a boy or a woman alone somewhere along the street and the lust to beat
or to kill would flood into them. Some frightful thing had to climax this accelerating madness.

  Words of the state song hummed through my memory:

  Way down South in Mississippi,

  Cotton blossoms white with the sun.

  We all love our Mississippi,

  Here we’ll stay where livin’ is fun.

  The evening stars shine brighter,

  And glad is every dewy morn,

  For way down South in Mississippi,

  Folks are happy they have been born.

  Scenes from books and movies came back - the laces, the shaded white-columned veranda with mint juleps served by an elegantly uniformed “darky,” the honor, the magnolia fragrance, the cotton fields where “darkies, happy and contented,” labored in the day and then gathered at the manse to serenade their beloved white folks with spirituals in the evening after supper … until the time when they could escape to freedom.

  Here, tonight, it was the wood plank beneath my seat, the barbecue grease on my lips, the need to hide from white eyes degenerate with contempt … even in the land “where livin’ is fun.”

  And God is love in Mississippi,

  Home and church her people hold dear.

  I rose stiffly to my feet. Suddenly I knew I could not go back up to that room with its mottled mirror, its dead lightbulb and its blank negatives.

  I knew of one white man in Hattiesburg to whom I might turn for help - a newspaperman, P.D. East. But I hesitated to call him. He had been so persecuted for seeking justice in race relations I was afraid my presence anywhere near him might further jeopardize him.

  I washed my hands and mouth under an outside faucet and walked around into the street to a phone.

  P.D. was not at home, but I explained the situation to his wife, Billie. She said she was long ago inured to shocks, and insisted on having P.D. rescue me.

  “Not if it’s going to cause you people more trouble,” I said. “I’m scared to death, but I ’d rather stay here than get you in any deeper.”

  “It’s late,” she said. “I’ll contact P.D. He can bring you here without your being seen. Stand in front of the drugstore. He’ll pick you up. Only one thing. You’re not to do any of your investigating around this area - okay?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “I mean, that would really get us in a jam …”

  “Of course - I wouldn’t think of it.”

  I waited in front of the lighted drugstore, which was closed down for the night. My nerves tightened each time a car passed. I expected another tangerine to be thrown or another oath to be hurled. Other Negroes stood in other doorways, watching me as though they thought I was insane to stand there in the bright light. A sensible man would wait in the darkness.

  Moments later a station wagon passed slowly and parked a few yards down the street. I was certain it must be P.D. and wondered at his foolishness in parking where he would have to walk along a sidewalk toward me, past a gauntlet of Negroes who might not recognize him and who had good cause that night to resent any white man.

  He got out and walked easily toward me, huge in the dim light. I could not speak. He shook my Negro hand in full view of everyone on the street. Then in his soft and cultivated voice he said: “Are you ready to go?”

  I nodded and we returned to his car. He held the door for me to get in and then drove off.

  “It’s amazing,” he said, after an uncomfortable silence.

  We drove through the darkened streets to his home, talking in a strangely stilted manner. I wondered why, and then realized that I had grown so accustomed to being a Negro, to being shown contempt, that I could not rid myself of the cautions. I was embarrassed to ride in the front seat of the car with a white man, especially on our way to his home. It was breaking the “Southern rule” somehow. Too, in this particular atmosphere, my “escape” was an emotional thing felt by both of us.

  I repeated my plea that he not take me home if it meant any embarrassment or danger for his wife and child. He ignored this.

  We drove into his carport, his wife stood in the shadows beside the house.

  “Well, hello, Uncle Tom,” she said.

  Once again the terrible truth struck me. Here in America, in this day, the simple act of whites receiving a Negro had to be a night thing and its aura of uneasiness had to be countered with gallows humor.

  What did we fear? I could not say exactly. It was unlikely the Klan would come riding down on us. We merely fell into the fear that hangs over the state, a nameless and awful thing. It reminded me of the nagging, focusless terror we felt in Europe when Hitler began his marches, the terror of talking with Jews (and our deep shame of it). For the Negro, at least, this fear is ever-present in the South, and the same is doubtlessly true of many decent whites who watch and wait, and feel the deep shame of it.

  Once inside their home, the awkwardness gradually lessened. However, it was painful for me. I could not accustom myself to sitting in their living room as an “equal.”

  They have a modest home, but it was a palace compared to the places I had lived in recently. Most striking, however, was the atmosphere of easiness, of trust and warmth. It came as a new revelation to me: the simple ability to enjoy the pleasures of one’s home, to relax and feel at ease. Though ordinary to most men, this was a luxury virtually unknown in my experience as a Negro.

  The Easts showed me to my room and suggested I might like to wash up. I noted as another example of gallows humor that Billie had put out black guest towels and a washcloth for me.

  We discussed our experiences until late in the night. We talked of our mutual friend, the literary historian Maxwell Geismar, who had introduced us by correspondence a year ago. P.D. had recently visited the Geismar home; he told me of the great help Max and Anne Geismar had solicited over the country for him.

  Then East fetched the manuscript of his autobiography, The Magnolia Jungle, which Simon & Schuster is publishing. At midnight I took the manuscript to my room, intending to glance through it before sleeping.

  I could not put the manuscript down. I read through the night the story of a native-born Southerner, a man who had tried to follow the crowd, who ran an innocuous little newspaper, The Petal Paper, glad-handed, joined the local civic clubs and kept himself in line with “popular opinion,” which meant “popular prejudice,” or “keep the nigger in his place,” in a Christian and 100 percent American fairplay manner, of course.

  “I glad-handed from hell to breakfast, winning friends and conning people,” he wrote. He adopted the Southern editorial policy, “Love American motherhood and hate sin” and never mention Negroes except in a manner harmonious to the Southern Way of Life. The Petal Paper carried local news along with short features such as “Citizen of the Week” and “Prayer and Meditation.” This latter, written by a local minister, was “aimed at those Christians who were afraid not to read any printed word about Jesus.”

  For the first year, East managed to please everyone and offend no one. The paper had prospered. He had made money and he was popular among the townspeople.

  East had fence-straddled all the major issues, if he mentioned them at all. At night he began to have trouble sleeping, to feel he was prostituting his conscience and his editorial responsibilities. “When I’d become aware of my state of mind, I would be frightened and snap back with a healthy smile and a hearty handshake. Such is the effect of the sweet smell of money.”

  More and more tormented, East entered a battle with his conscience, his sense of decency. It became clear to him that though he wrote in his paper what his readers wanted to see, this was not always the truth. As the situation in the South degenerated after the 1954 Supreme Court decision on segregation, he was faced with a choice - either he must continue more and more to alter truth to make it conform to people’s comfort, or he must write the truth in the dim hope that people would alter their comfort to conform to it.

  His editorials began to lean away from the “correct” Southern att
itude. He used the word “fair” to describe his new editorial policy. “I thought honestly and sincerely that with rare exception a man could say what he wished without fear of reprisal, especially a man with a newspaper who was seeking to expand his commercial and unhappy soul in a direction that was, for a rare change, decent and honest.” His decision to be fair was not in keeping with the “correct” Southern attitude.

  He continued stubbornly to preach justice. He said that in order to prove that the Negroes have no right to their freedoms, we were subverting the very principles that preserve the spirit of our own … we are endangering ourselves, no matter what our race and creed.

  In essence, he asked for ethical and virtuous social conduct. He said that before we can have justice, we must first have truth, and he insisted on his right and duty to print the truth. Significantly, this was considered high treason.

  I lay in the bed, under a lamp, and read and smoked cigarettes. Through the wall of the room, I heard P.D. snore, but in here he was much awake on the pages.

  He was threatened and hounded by anonymous callers. The Citizens Councils found him worthy of their attention, after which he lost most of his local subscribers and ads. In a country of free speech and press, they starved him out for expressing views not in harmony with their prejudices.

  For example, he questioned a bill proposed in the state legislature that would authorize use of tax funds to support the White Citizens Councils. He asked if it is fair to take tax money from the Negro and then use it to support an organization set up for the avowed purpose of suppressing him.

  Another bill, to levy penalizing fines against a church holding non-segregated services, was, he contended, in flagrant contradiction to the First Amendment of the Constitution.

  He pointed out that these were simply the old story of legalized injustice. The local state legislature (in opposition to constitutional law) insisted that whatever it decided was de jure law, a position that wipes out the distinction between true and false judgments. “For,” as Burke said, “if the judgment makes the law and not the law directs the judgment, it is impossible there should be such a thing as an illegal judgment given.” A law is not good merely because the legislature wills it, but the legislature has the moral duty to will only that which is good.