Black Like Me

by John Howard Griffin

  I thanked him for the ride and opened the door. Before I could get out, he spoke again. “I’ll tell you how it is here. We’ll do business with you people. We’ll sure as hell screw your women. Other than that, you’re just completely off the record as far as we’re concerned. And the quicker you people get that through your heads, the better off you’ll be.”

  “Yes, sir …” I stepped out and closed the door. He drove down the side road scattering fine gravel behind his wheels. I listened until his truck was out of hearing distance. The heavy air of evening, putrid with swamp rot, smelled fragrant. I walked across the highway, sat on my duffel and waited for another car. None came. The woods issued no sound. I felt strangely safe, isolated, alone in the stillness of dusk turning into night. First stars appeared in darkening skies still pale and the earth’s heat escaped upward.

  My mouth was dry and my stomach began to ache for food. I realized I had not eaten or had a drink of water all day. Cold surrounded me rapidly. I got up and began to walk along the highway in the darkness. It was better to walk than to freeze. My duffel pulled heavily at my arms and I knew I could not go far without food and rest.

  I wondered at the lack of traffic on Alabama highways. No cars passed. My footsteps on the roadside gravel sloughed in echo from the wall of trees and brush.

  After a while a light flickered among the foliage. I hurried forward around the curve of highway until I saw it came from an isolated service station at the top of the hill. When I arrived opposite it, I stood for some time across the highway and watched. An elderly white couple sat inside, surrounded by shelves of groceries and auto supplies, by soft drink machines and cigarette dispensers. They looked kind, gentle, and I framed in advance what I should say to allay any fears they might have of a large Negro appearing out of the night, and to convince them that they should sell me food and drink. Perhaps I might even ask them to let me spend the night sleeping on the floor there.

  The woman saw me approach past the lighted gasoline lamps. I whistled to give them warning. She met me at the door. I felt an outgush of warm air and heard country music from a radio when she opened. I glanced through the glass to see the man seated in a chair, his ear close to his small radio.

  “Pardon me, ma’am,” I said, nodding low. “I’m traveling through to Montgomery. I got stranded on the highway and can’t seem to get a ride. I wonder if I could buy something to eat and drink?”

  She studied me with suspicion, her eyes hard in their wrinkles.

  “We’re closing up,” she said and stepped back to shut the door.

  “Please,” I pleaded, not needing to feign abjection. “I’ve been without food and water all day.”

  I could see her hesitate, her caution and repugnance struggling against instincts of common decency. She obviously wanted to refuse me. She was undoubtedly afraid not only of me but of having someone drive up for gasoline and see her waiting on me. But I recalled the driver’s statement: “We’ll do business with you people.” I waited. The night was cold, the country lonely. Even animals had to eat and drink.

  “Well, I guess it’s all right,” she said with disgust. She turned back into the room. I stepped inside and closed the door. Neither of them spoke. The old man glanced up at me from a lean, seamed face devoid of all expression.

  I bought an orange drink and a package of cracker sandwiches. The atmosphere was so inhospitable I stepped outside where they could watch me and drank the orange. When I finished, I returned the empty bottle and quickly bought another. The store had little to offer in the way of food that I could manage. The only two cans of sardines had no keys and the owner stared at the floor, nodding no when I asked if he had a can opener. I bought a fried pie, a loaf of bread and five Milky Way bars.

  The woman stood in front of the gas heater and picked the dirt from under her thumbnail with the third finger of the other hand. When I mumbled my thanks, she was so absorbed in her task that she acknowledged my departure only by staring at her hands with a deeper frown. The husband stuck the money in his shirt pocket.

  I walked down the highway into the darkness again, carrying both duffel bags in my left hand and feeding myself the tasteless pineapple fried pie with my right.

  A distant hum behind me caught my attention. I turned to see a yellow glow on the road’s horizon. It grew stronger and headlights appeared. Though I dreaded riding with another white man, I dreaded more staying on the road all night. Stepping out into full view, I waved my arms. An ancient car braked to a halt and I hurried to it. To my great relief, the reflections from the dash light showed me the face of a young Negro man.

  We discussed my problem. He said he lived back in the woods, but had six kids and only two rooms. He wouldn’t even have a bed to offer me. I asked him about some other house in the area where I might rent a bed. He said there were none any better than what he had to offer.

  However, we could find no other solution.

  “You can’t stand out here all night. If you don’t mind sleeping on the floor, you’re welcome to come with me,” he said finally.

  “I don’t mind sleeping on the floor,” I said. “I just wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  As we drove several miles down a lane into the forest, he told me he was a sawmill worker and never made quite enough to get out from under his debts. Always, when he took his check to the store, he owed a little more than the check could cover. He said it was the same for everyone else; and indeed I have seen the pattern throughout my travels. Part of the Southern white’s strategy is to get the Negro in debt and keep him there.

  “It makes it hard, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “Yeah, but you can’t stop,” he answered quickly. “That’s what I tell the men at the mill. Some of them are willing just to sit there. I told them, ‘Okay, so you’re going to give up just because you get no butter with your bread. That’s no way to act. Go ahead and eat the bread - but work, and maybe someday we’ll have butter to go with it.’ I tell them we sure ain’t going to get it any other way.”

  I asked him if he could not get together with some of the others and strike for better wages. He laughed with real amusement.

  “Do you know how long we’d last, doing something like that?”

  “Well, if you stuck together, they sure couldn’t kill you all.”

  “They could damn sure try,” he snorted. “Anyway, how long could I feed my kids? There’s only a couple of stores in twenty miles. They’d cut off credit and refuse to sell to us. Without money coming in, none of us could live.”

  He turned off the lane into a rutted path that led through dense underbrush up to a knoll. The headlights fell on a shanty of unpainted wood, patched at the bottom with a rusting Dr. Pepper sign. Except for the voices of children, a deep silence hung over the place. The man’s wife came to the door and stood silhouetted against the pale light of a kerosene lamp. He introduced us. Though she appeared embarrassed, she asked me in.

  The subdued babble of children mounted to excited shouts of welcome. They ranged in age from nine years to four months. They were overjoyed to have company. It must be a party. We decided it was.

  Supper was on a makeshift table. It consisted entirely of large yellow beans cooked in water. The mother prepared mashed beans and canned milk for the infant. I remembered the bread and offered it as my contribution to the meal. Neither parent apologized for the meagerness of the food. We served ourselves on plastic dishes from the table and sat where we could find places, the children on the floor with a spread-out newspaper for a tablecloth.

  I congratulated them on such a fine family. The mother told me they had been truly blessed. “Ours are all in good health. When you think of so many people with crippled or blind or not-right children, you just have to thank God.” I praised the children until the father’s tired face animated with pride. He looked at the children the way another looks at some rare painting or treasured gem.

  Closed into the two rooms, with only the soft light of tw
o kerosene lamps, the atmosphere changed. The outside world, outside standards disappeared. They were somewhere beyond in the vast darkness. In here, we had all we needed for gaiety. We had shelter, some food in our bellies, the bodies and eyes and affections of children who were not yet aware of how things were. And we had treats. We cut the Milky Way bars into thin slices for dessert. In a framework of nothing, slices of Milky Way become a great gift. With almost rabid delight, the children consumed them. One of the smaller girls salivated so heavily the chocolate dribbled syrup-like from the corner of her mouth. Her mother wiped it off with her fingertip and unconsciously (from what yearning?) put it in her own mouth.

  After supper, I went outside with my host to help him carry water from a makeshift boarded well. A near full moon shone above the trees and chill penetrated as though brilliance strengthened it. We picked our way carefully through fear of snakes down a faint footpath to the edge of the trees to urinate. The moon-speckled landscape exhaled its night rustlings, its truffle-odor of swamps. Distantly the baby cried. I listened to the muffled rattle of our waters against damp leaf loam. A fragment of memory returned - recollection of myself as a youngster reading Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, her description of the Negro boy stopping along a lonely path to urinate. Now, years later, I was there in a role foreign to my youth’s wildest imaginings. I felt more profoundly than ever before the totality of my Negro-ness, the immensity of its isolating effects. The transition was complete from the white boy reading a book about Negroes in the safety of his white living room to an old Negro man in the Alabama swamps, his existence nullified by men but reaffirmed by nature, in his functions, in his affection.

  “Okay?” my friend said and we turned back. Moonlight caught his protruding cheekbones and cast the hollows beneath into shadow.

  “Okay,” I said.

  The house stood above us, rickety, a faint light at the windows. I could hear the whites say, “Look at that shanty. They live like animals. If they wanted to do better they could. And they expect us just to accept them? They like to live this way. It would make them just as miserable to demand a higher standard of living as it would make us miserable to put us down to that standard.”

  I mentioned this to my host. “But we can’t do any better,” he said. “ We work just for that … to have something a little better for the kids and us.”

  “Your wife doesn’t seem to get down in the dumps,” I remarked.

  “No - she’s good all the way through. I’ll tell you - if we don’t have meat to cook with the beans, why she just goes ahead and cooks the beans anyhow.” He said this last with a flourish that indicated the grandness of her attitude.

  We placed buckets of water on the cast-iron wood stove in the kitchen so we could have warm water for washing and shaving. Then we returned outside to fill the wood-box.

  “Are there really a lot of alligators in these swamps?” I asked.

  “Oh God yes, the place is alive with them.”

  “Why don’t you kill some of them? The tails make good meat. I could show you how. We learned in jungle training when I was in the army.”

  “Oh, we can’t do that,” he said. “They stick a hundred-dollar fine on you for killing a gator. I’m telling you,” he laughed sourly, “they got all the loopholes plugged. There ain’t a way you can win in this state.”

  “But what about the children?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid the gators might eat one of them?”

  “No …” he said forlornly, “the gators like turtles better than they do us.”

  “They must be part white,” I heard myself say.

  His laughter sounded flat in the cold air. “As long as they keep their bellies full with turtles, they’re no danger to us. Anyway, we keep the kids close to the house.”

  (Later I learned that the fine for killing alligators appears to be a conservation measure and means of controlling turtles, not a punitive action against the Negroes, though few Negroes realize this.)

  The cheerful and fretful noises of children being readied for bed drifted to us as we returned to the kitchen. Physical modesty in such cramped quarters was impossible, indeed in such a context it would have been ridiculous. The mother sponge-bathed the children while the husband and I shaved. Each of the children went to the toilet, a zinc bucket in the corner, since it was too cold for them to go outside.

  Their courtesy to me was exquisite. While we spread tow sacks on the floor and then feed sacks over them, the children asked questions about my own children. Did they go to school? No, they were too young. How old were they then? Why, today is my daughter’s fifth birthday. Would she have a party? Yes, she’d certainly have a party. Excitement. Like we had here, with the candy and everything? Yes, something like that.

  But it was time to go to bed, time to stop asking questions. The magic remained for them, almost unbearable to me - the magic of children thrilled to know my daughter had a party. The parents brought in patch-work quilts from under the bed in the other room and spread them over the pallets. The children kissed their parents and then wanted to kiss Mr. Griffin. I sat down on a straight-back chair and held out my arms. One by one they came, smelling of soap and childhood. One by one they put their arms around my neck and touched their lips to mine. One by one they said and giggled soberly, “Good night, Mr. Griffin.”

  I stepped over them to go to my pallet near the kitchen door and lay down fully dressed. Warning the children he did not want to hear another word from them, the father picked up the kerosene lamp and carried it into the bedroom. Through the doorless opening I saw light flicker on the walls. Neither of them spoke. I heard the sounds of undressing. The lamp was blown out and a moment later their bedsprings creaked.

  Fatigue spread through me, making me grateful for a tow sack bed. I fought back glimpses of my daughter’s birthday party in its cruel contrasts to our party here tonight.

  “If you need anything, Mr. Griffin, just holler,” the man said.

  “Thank You. I will. Good night.”

  “Good night,” the children said, their voices locating them in the darkness.

  “Good night,” again.

  “Good night, Mr. Griffin.”

  “That’s enough,” the father called out warningly to them.

  I lay there watching moonlight pour through the crack of the ill-fitting door as everyone drifted to sleep. Mosquitoes droned loudly until the room was a great hum. I wondered that they should be out on such a cold night. The children jerked in their sleep and I knew they had been bitten. The stove cooled gradually with almost imperceptible interior pops and puffings. Odors of the night and autumn and the swamp entered to mingle with the inside odors of children, kerosene, cold beans, urine and the dead incense of pine ashes. The rot and the freshness combined into a strange fragrance - the smell of poverty. For a moment I knew the intimate and subtle joys of misery.

  And yet misery was the burden, the pervading, killing burden. I understood why they had so many children. These moments of night when the swamp and darkness surrounded them evoked an immense loneliness, a dread, a sense of exile from the rest of humanity. When the awareness of it strikes, a man either suffocates with despair or he turns to cling to his woman, to console and seek consolation. Their union is momentary escape from the swamp night, from utter hopelessness of its ever getting better for them. It is an ultimately tragic act wherein the hopeless seek hope.

  Thinking about these things, the bravery of these people attempting to bring up a family decently, their gratitude that none of their children were blind or maimed, their willingness to share their food and shelter with a stranger - the whole thing overwhelmed me. I got up from bed, half-frozen anyway, and stepped outside.

  A thin fog blurred the moon. Trees rose as ghostly masses in the diffused light. I sat on an inverted washtub and trembled as its metallic coldness seeped through my pants.

  I thought of my daughter, Susie, and her fifth birthday today, the candles, the cake and party dress; and of my sons in t
heir best suits. They slept now in clean beds in a warm house while their father, a bald-headed old Negro, sat in the swamps and wept, holding it in so he would not awaken the Negro children.

  I felt again the Negro children’s lips soft against mine, so like the feel of my own children’s good-night kisses. I saw again their large eyes, guileless, not yet aware that doors into wonderlands of security, opportunity and hope were closed to them.

  It was thrown in my face. I saw it not as a white man and not as a Negro, but as a human parent. Their children resembled mine in all ways except the superficial one of skin color, as indeed they resembled all children of all humans. Ye t this accident, this least important of all qualities, the skin pigment, marked them for inferior status. It became fully terrifying when I realized that if my skin were permanently black, they would unhesitatingly consign my own children to this bean future.

  One can scarcely conceive the full horror of it unless one is a parent who takes a close look at his children and then asks himself how he would feel if a group of men should come to his door and tell him they had decided - for reasons of convenience to them - that his children’s lives would henceforth be restricted, their world smaller, their educational opportunities less, their future mutilated.

  One would then see it as the Negro parent sees it, for this is precisely what happens. He looks at his children and knows. No one, not even a saint, can live without a sense of personal value. The white racist has masterfully defrauded the Negro of this sense. It is the least obvious but most heinous of all race crimes, for it kills the spirit and the will to live.

  It was too much. Though I was experiencing it, I could not believe it. Surely in America a whole segment of decent souls could not stand by and allow such massive crimes to be committed. I tried to see the whites’ side as I have all along. I have studied objectively the anthropological arguments, the accepted clichés about cultural and ethnic differences. And I have found their application simply untrue. The two great arguments - the Negro’s lack of sexual morality and his intellectual incapacity - are smoke screens to justify prejudice and unethical behavior. Recent scientific studies, published in The Eighth Generation (Harper & Brothers, New York), show that the contemporary middle-class Negro has the same family cult, the same ideals and goals as his white counterpart. The Negro’s lower scholastic showing springs not from racial default, but from being deprived of cultural and educational advantages by the whites. When the segregationist argues that the Negro is scholastically inferior, he presents the most eloquent possible argument for desegregated schools; he admits that so long as the Negro is kept in tenth-rate schools he will remain scholastically behind white children.